


Recursive

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Series: Recursive [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Aftermath of Torture, Am I mad in a coma or back in time?, Captain America: The First Avenger, Gen, Infinity Gems, PTSD, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Prisoner of War, Rescue Missions, Time Travel, Torture, War, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-21 10:28:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 67,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1547360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the wake of the HYDRA revelations, Steve Rogers finds himself both a pawn of the rebuilding SHIELD hierarchy and the leader of a newly-independent Avengers. He’s got masters he can’t run from, teammates he can’t let down, and a best friend who is turning his newly remembered past to ashes.</p><p>But when a blast from a mysterious device seemingly sends him back to 1944, Steve has to decide if he should he change his past and risk ruining his future by fixing his greatest mistake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"That kind of day?"

Steve had been leaning against the elevator wall with his eyes closed, but opened them at the words, then stood up straight at the speaker because, even out of uniform and even with Steve retired from the service, Colonel Rhodes was a senior officer and it was still instinct to respect the rank.

Said senior officer gave him a dirty look until Steve resumed his slouch against the wall.

"That kind of day is all I seem to have here," Steve replied, forcing himself to swallow the 'sir' before it passed his lips. They'd had _that_ discussion already.

The Triskelion was gone, but there were still other SHIELD towers to elevate the powerful over the rest of them. With Pierce dead, Fury "dead," and most of the WSC chairs still empty, Councilwoman Hawley was the de facto head of the agency until some order could be made out of the chaos -- or at least until they could figure out who was HYDRA and not promote them to the Director's chair. Hawley was tough edging toward ruthless, which under the circumstances was understandable, but it didn't make Steve's life any easier or less complicated.

"You tried to quit again, didn't you," Rhodes asked with a chuckle as the doors closed. He didn't hit a button, so he was going down to the lobby same as Steve. "Third time wasn't the charm?"

"More like fifth and no," Steve confirmed sourly. He understood why Hawley wasn't interested in accepting his resignation -- he wasn't oblivious to the chatter that he should be the next Director, which was unwanted and ridiculous from every perspective but the PR optics of an intelligence organization that had been corrupted to its core -- but he didn't quite understand why that mattered. He wasn't a slave of SHIELD, wasn't indentured in any way... except he was, for all intents and purposes. Hawley had made it clear that there would be repercussions beyond stopping his pay if he refused to show up to work when requested and when he'd tried other avenues, there'd been an apologetic but firm phone call from the President more or less confirming the threat. He wasn't sure how they'd actually make it work, although he suspected it would be through the Army, and he'd been convinced by the people he actually wanted to work with that there were worthwhile reasons not to find out. Hill and Fury both wanted him at SHIELD, which didn't not matter, and both Natasha and Tony had put forward cases for why it was better to play along than not. But that didn't mean he had to like it or to go along with it docilely and today's meeting, in part, had been about reinforcing that.

"You heading back up to New York?" Rhodes asked when they got to the lobby. Steve nodded. "Want a lift?" Rhodes gestured upward, a smile playing at one corner of his mouth. "I'm heading that way."

With Tony both unready and, to a degree, unwilling to jump back into the Iron Man armor -- major thoracic surgery, repairs to his professional and personal lives, rebuilding the suits and their accouterments -- the Avengers had needed a flyer and War Machine had filled the void. Tony was much closer to a return, but Steve hoped that Rhodes would stick around. He was good for the team and good for Tony and, Steve thought, the good went both ways. The purging of HYDRA from the uniformed ranks had been an ugly spectacle, however necessary, and everyone who'd served, past and present, had felt it to a degree. The Avengers were still finding their footing and their identity as an independent entity, but they were a decent sanctuary for battered idealists. Steve should know.

"I drove down," Steve replied with a slight shrug to admit that it wasn't necessarily an obstacle but one he was choosing to allow to be one. He needed the time to think and clear his head before returning to Avengers Tower and, as much as he loved getting a lift through the air -- and make no mistake about it, he loved it -- feeding his adrenaline habit wasn't conducive to organizing his thoughts. Getting stuck on 95 in bumper to bumper traffic between Philly and Trenton was higher stress, but also more effective.

"I'll make sure they save you some pizza," Rhodes said with a nod and they parted.

The drive up from Wilmington did its thing, more or less. He rehashed the discussion with Hawley, parsing out the meanings of what she was and wasn't saying to try to get a little bit of a glimpse of her bigger picture. They'd explicitly disagreed about the profile of Steve's missions; he'd accused her of turning him into a trick pony and tipping off the local media when he'd gone in to take down a HYDRA-infested SHIELD sub-base in Minneapolis. She hadn't denied it exactly, just shifted the topic slightly and he'd been dogged in his refusal to drop it. She got the benefit of his good name by his continued participation in the organization; there didn't need to be photo-ops and press releases. "I'm not running for office and you're not my campaign manager," he'd said, which in turn had brought up another round of sounding him out about the Directorship, although in oblique enough terms that he couldn't call her on it. This was the part of the discussion that was shaded and opaque and while he'd gotten pretty good at hearing what was being said as opposed to what was being spoken, he didn't have a good enough handle on Hawley yet to figure out her game. He didn't know if she wanted him to be the Director or not, whether she was positioning him for a promotion he didn't want -- and might have no chance to refuse -- or the opposite, setting him up for a disgrace that would end his chances once and for all so that she could bring in someone else without the specter of Captain America looming in the near distance. The way it would if she just let him quit and be a full-time Avenger.

By the time he pulled in to the garage at the Tower and made it upstairs, he still wasn't sure what Hawley was going for, but it wasn't a question that was going to be answered in a day, either. He went to his own quarters and might have been tempted to stay there and cook dinner for himself, but there were three messages (from Clint, Tony, and Sam) via JARVIS reminding him that tonight was a communal dinner and attendance, short of an actual emergency that might require proof of a missing limb, was required. He was the field commander of the Avengers, but he made no pretense as to actually being in charge of anything.

When he got upstairs to Tony's penthouse, Pepper was sort-of consoling Sam about his continued frustrations dealing with the VA's bureaucracy; the sort-of coming from the fact that she was probably laughing-at more than she was laughing-with. Sam had readily agreed to join up when Tony had formally rebooted the Avengers Initiative as a Maria Stark Foundation project, having transferred up to the VA's New York offices once he had been reasonably sure that replacements had been found to lead all of his sessions in DC. He was enjoying the new work responsibilities, but tonight he was lamenting the fact that he'd had to search in three different boroughs to find his VA pay stub, even though he was on direct deposit, because he rotated between the Bronx, Harbor, and Brooklyn VA hospitals and none of them had had his.

"You know what the ten most dangerous words in the English language are, don't you?" Tony asked with a smirk as he crossed the living room to hand Steve a beer. "'Hi, I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' Reagan was wrong about a lot of things, but not that."

Sam, who was not naive, but was from the government and did help, made a silent appeal to Steve.

"Don't look to me, Sergeant," Steve demurred as he sat down heavily and took a long sip of his beer. "I just spent the afternoon being reminded that I am not, in fact, a free citizen because my government needs me."

A smirk from Tony. "Rhodey mentioned you had gone a few rounds with Hawley today," he said, perching on the armrest of Pepper's chair. "Wasn't sure if you'd won or lost."

"I'm not sure, either," Steve admitted. "But I think it probably gets filed under 'wining the battle and losing the war.'"

He'd at least gotten Hawley to stop putting him on 'sunshine' duty and back to the sort of work he'd been doing before HYDRA's presence had been detected. It wasn't that he thought the work was beneath him, just that he was unsuited for it by training and temperament. He'd never really dealt with the field agent and research parts of SHIELD; he'd led the cleanup of the STRIKE units, with whom he was familiar, but he was a soldier and not designed to wrangle spies and scientists.

"Where is Colonel Rhodes?" he asked, looking around. Natasha and Bruce were not in town for different reasons and Thor had gone to Cleveland for a weekend to accompany Jane Foster to a conference, but if pizza night was mandatory, that still left Clint and Rhodes. "And Clint?"

"Barton's in the little archer's room," Tony replied, getting up off of the armrest because Pepper was pushing him and the timer was going off in the kitchen. "Rhodey has a date."

"I get increasingly dire warnings of what happens if I miss Pizza Night and other people can skip out on dates?"

"If there were even half a chance that you were skipping out to get laid, you could blow it off, too," Clint said from behind as he rejoined the group. "But there isn't. You would blow it off to go sit at your kitchen table and eat Cheerios and read RUMINT about where Bucky Barnes might be. Which is why it's mandatory for you."

Steve looked over at Sam, who was grinning. "Don't look to me, Captain," he replied in the same tone Steve had used.

"Pizza is served!" Tony announced from the kitchen doorway. "First up is pepperoni-mushroom and sausage-broccoli. And yes, Pep, there is a salad because no, Pep, I know that broccoli on a pizza does not count as a serving of vegetables."

Pepper smiled as she stood gracefully, taking her wine glass with her. "I have him so well trained."

* * *

"I don't know if this counts as good news or bad news," Natasha warned as she slid a tablet over to his side of the table. She'd gotten back from wherever she'd been -- as with Clint, he didn't ask and they didn't tell where they went off to -- on Sunday, slept until Monday afternoon, and shown up at his door on Monday evening with news.

(Clint was living up to his codename and playing bird of prey for Fury, Natasha was doing a mostly less lethal version of the same thing for Hill, who was building a shadow version of SHIELD within all levels of government and the security services -- people like Sharon Carter who'd be reliable even in another agency's uniform. Steve didn't need to know details and was happier not knowing them, not because he quailed at it, but instead because it was safer for him not to know while he was still ensnared in SHIELD's power games.)

"Who did he kill?" Steve asked with weary wariness as he accepted the tablet. He knew Natasha's tones of voice well enough by now that he recognized this one, vaguely apologetic and striving for 'unaffected' was the one that came with unhappy news about Bucky. Who was still very much in the wind and showing no sign that he wanted anything to do with Steve. Revenge, on the other hand, that was of interest to him. There were four people they could reasonably assume that Bucky had killed, all four of them with ties to both SHIELD and HYDRA and, judging by their scientific specialization, all likely to have been responsible for working directly on the Winter Soldier project. But they'd been elderly, inactive for decades, and neither Steve nor Natasha could make a guess as to why Bucky was starting there, whether he was being methodical or whether his memories were so incomplete to make them his only possible targets.

"Nobody," Natasha answered. "But I'm not sure this is better."

The tablet was showing a newspaper clipping from the _Fresno Bee_ about the desecration of a Howling Commandos memorial, complete with a photo. Fresno had been Jim Morita's hometown and while he'd moved out of the city proper after the war, it had still claimed him as their proud son. There had been acid thrown at the abstract art piece that symbolized the Commandos, a seven-pronged affair that looked like a cross between a candelabra and a jellyfish with each prong having the name of the Commandos, Steve included, engraved in it. He didn't need to read the article to know which prong had been so badly marred.

"At least we know where he's been," Steve sighed, since Natasha was clearly waiting for some reaction. "There are a million memorials, but he picked one that mattered and he only tried to wipe himself away, not damage anyone else's name."

Which meant he knew who he was -- or who he was supposed to be -- and who the others were, since Fresno could not have been an accident. Steve was going to take it as a positive that Bucky hadn't splashed his own prong as well. 

Natasha made a face that could have meant anything. "We can't monitor everything with James Barnes's name on it. Not even just the ones that have significance."

Steve nodded in agreement. "But we can watch the school," he said. There was a public elementary school over in Brownsville named after Bucky, a random enough choice because Bucky had probably never been anywhere near Brownsville, but at least it was in Brooklyn. Steve had originally thought it funny less for the location than for the fact that Bucky, never the most eager of pupils, would have found it hilarious. Except now, instead of finding it funny, they had to worry about Bucky blowing the damned thing up. "He won't do anything when the kids are there, that I'm sure of, but..."

"Yeah," Natasha agreed. "Brooklyn's a special case. We're still tapping into the security feed of where your old place used to be."

It was now a new building entirely, a laundromat on the first floor and a couple of apartments above it. There was a little plaque on a cornerstone saying that this was once where Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes had lived, which Steve had rolled his eyes over, but that was it. There would be nothing to look at that Bucky might see and find familiar.

"But right now, Fresno," Steve said, looking at the date on the clipping. "Is it worthwhile looking over anything in Boston for Dugan or... where did Gabe end up settling down? I know he was in Atlanta for a while after he retired, but... I talked to his grandson once and he said something about North Carolina, I think."

In the end, though, it didn't matter. They wouldn't be able to do more than pick up any word after the fact, like they had done with Fresno. There were ways JARVIS could parse the newspapers to find any other memorial that had been damaged, but they could not dedicate any more resources at the moment. 

Wednesday night, Steve took a late train from Penn Station down to Wilmington because mission kickoff was oh-dark-thirty Thursday morning. He went over the mission notes on the train, then dozed in an empty office with couch for a few hours before going downstairs to meet with his team and make the drive down to Dover AFB, where SHIELD was renting space to keep aircraft while things were getting repaired closer to DC. It wasn't a complicated mission, just down to Nicaragua to take out a HYDRA facility that intel said was supposed to be an indoctrination/training camp but turned out to be a munitions development plant, so they wound up shooting less and accidentally blowing up more, then blowing up more on purpose because they couldn't carry all that they had found. There were computers and notes and prisoners and they took all that back to Delaware and, after a quick debrief, Steve was back on an Amtrak heading north by midnight Thursday. 

"Rise and shine, sleepyhead," Tony's voice echoed around his bedroom as the lights suddenly turned on, startling him awake. He looked over at the bedside clock, which said 7:25. "You know that cute little pet apatasaurus you had growing up back in the Jurassic Period? Well, he's off the leash in downtown Houston and we need to go get him before he sets the Gulf of Mexico on fire." 

"Tony," he groaned, rubbing at his face. "I got to bed at four-thirty. I am, in the parlance of your people, not in the mood for this shit." 

"Sorry, Cap," Sam's voice echoed next; Tony could be heard cackling in the background. "I really wish he was pulling your leg, but we got actual dinosaurs to go fight."

Steve supposed he should have been more shocked by this than he was, but he'd also been frozen for seventy years and then had to fight aliens, so he wasn't. He was instead showered, shaved, and in the meeting room in track pants and a t-shirt inside ten minutes holding a mug of coffee, still a little too hot to drink, and watching video footage that the others were making movie references about. "Do I want to ask where the dinosaurs came from?" 

There were three, a brontosaurus, a triceratops, and a stegosaurus, and the fact that they were all herbivores and not trying to eat anyone or their pets did not mitigate against the fact that they were laying waste to much of Houston. The brontosaurus -- whatever it was called now -- was seventy feet long and had a tail that was leveling buildings and sending cars flying. They had shown up at dawn and nobody knew what the hell to do with them. The Air Force, which had scrambled fighters immediately, was reluctant to try missiles or heavy weaponry because even if they hit the dinosaurs, there was no saying how much damage they'd do, either to the dinos or to whatever got hit by falling beasts -- or flying dinosaur parts. And if they missed, there would be more casualties and fires to take care of when the Houston and area first responders were already overwhelmed. 

"This dude is our bet," Sam answered, flinging a different image on to the holographic projector from his tablet with an expressive gesture. A man with dark brown hair and pointed ears wearing only a pair of brief swimming trunks appeared on the screen hovering over a group of policemen on a city street. "He's calling himself Namor and he's kinda pissed at all of us humans for what we've done to the oceans. The bar for eco-terrorism has just been raised so high you can see it from space."

Namor could fly, apparently, was bulletproof without armor, and tossed cars and people with equal ease. There was no audio on the footage, but even without reading his lips, it wasn't hard to see how furious -- and mad in the more traditional sense -- he was. He was shouting, snarling, and gesturing imperiously at innocent civilians and first responders alike. He'd found the mayor of Houston and had grabbed him by the shirt lapel, hoisted him into the air like a pillow, and shaken him hard enough to knock him unconscious before dropping him without a care. 

"That doodad around his neck looks too pretty to be decorative," Clint said sourly. Namor was wearing an amulet around his neck on a heavy gold-colored chain that looked to be made of orange light, but from a different angle Steve could see that it was just an oval gemstone of unusual brilliance. 

"I would not have believed it real," Thor murmured, still mostly to himself. "There are stories told on Asgardia and other worlds, children's stories not worth repeating for their context, but they tell of a sun stolen from the skies of a faraway land and trapped in a diamond the shape of an egg. The sun was not just any sun, however, but instead an elemental fire from the dawn of time and the possessor of the gem could control all time and know all things."

Steve looked up and over at Thor, who was frowning, as if he'd just realized something unpleasant. "Is there more to the story?" 

Thor shook his head. "I would not know fact from fiction," he admitted. "I could tell you many versions of the tale, but not what to expect from this Namor and his beasts of a past age."

Tony came into the room, dressed in the clothes he wore underneath the Iron Man armor; he'd been testing the latest model for the last couple of weeks, but only flying around the Tri-State area and not even in simulated combat and Steve wasn't sure he was ready for the real thing. "Okay," Tony announced, "we have an official invitation from the governor of Texas to come in and try to lasso these guys. Rhodey's already en route from DC, Natasha's off the grid, and Bruce will be ready to go if we pick him up." 

Steve started drinking his coffee, feeling the burn as it went down. He could feel eyes upon him; Tony was their facilitator in many ways, but when it came to running into a battle, everyone still looked to him because that's how they'd trained. He swallowed and nodded. "Let's go."

Thor, Sam, and Clint started toward the door, but Tony was picking up the tablet to rewind some of the footage and Steve went over to him. "Are you ready for this?" he asked. "I know you want back in the field and I want you there, too, but we both know that while diving in headfirst will get it done, there are better ways. This is going to be one hell of a shakedown cruise."

Fairly early on in their acquaintanceship, Steve had figured out that the key to getting a straight answer out of Tony was to wait him out. Tony's default reaction was always to laugh off concerns and say something that might be funny or might be mean or might be both at once. But if you held your ground, the veneer disappeared and you could, if you were patient, get a real response. This was no brilliant insight, but it had required time and effort to be able to put it into practice because Tony was very good at driving people away. 

Steve waited, watching Tony cycle from defiance to pride to thoughtfulness to wry resignation in all of a heartbeat. 

"I'm not ready to go mano-a-dino, no," Tony admitted, running his fingers through his hair so that stood up at odd angles. "That's why Rhodey's already in the air. But I need to be there, both for the armor and, well, for me. I'll stay high, coordinate, fire off a few repulsor blasts from a safe distance. I won't make things worse." 

Steve had his doubts about Tony's ability to live up to a promise to stay out of trouble, but this was part of the learning curve of the new Avengers -- trusting each other to be honest, to think of others, to obey field commands, to be a unit instead of a group of individuals coincidentally in the same place fighting the same foe. 

"Let's go then," Steve said, handing Tony his coffee mug and walking toward the door. The other key to successfully managing Tony was to never acknowledge that you'd seen the soft underbelly beneath the armor. "Put that in the kitchen so I can go change."

"I'm not your gopher," Tony said sourly, but he took the mug. 

"I'm not the one with the magic self-dressing armor," Steve called behind him as he walked. 

Three hours later, they were hovering over the southern part of Houston, where the stegosaurus was being ineffectively corralled away from an oil refinery. They'd picked up Bruce en route, Rhodey had arrived a few minutes before they had, and so Steve had a full complement (minus Natasha) to work with as he organized the team and their activities. The best play, he thought was to maneuver the trio of dinosaurs into Galveston Bay, where they could be dispatched with less collateral damage than inside the city, and that would also maximize the use of the military elements that had come up from Corpus Christi and east from the inland bases. The tanks and infantry units had not proven to be able to stop the dinosaurs, but maybe they could be sheepdogs, herding them toward the coast. 

Namor, on the other hand, was a problem of a whole different order. He had, if anything, grown madder in the hours since the Avengers had left New York, not quite foaming at the mouth, but definitely at the spittle-flecked stage. He was threatening tidal waves and tsunamis and the destruction of every coastal city around the globe as punishment for what the "surface dwellers" had done to his kingdom of Atlantis. He had killed more than two dozen personally, apart from what damage the dinosaurs had done, picking up a city bus that was being used to evacuate civilians and throwing it at an oil refinery's tank, starting a fire that still hadn't been put out. 

Steve put the Hulk on dinosaur duty, explaining first to Bruce and then to the Hulk what he wanted done, and partnered him with both War Machine and the Falcon because Rhodes had the firepower and Sam had the best rapport with the Hulk and was deft enough to play bait for a brontosaurus. He sent Thor and Iron Man into the sky against Namor, the former to try to engage him on a royal-to-royal basis (it couldn't hurt) and the latter to provide backup and use some of his fancy sensors to give them any clue about Namor's power limits and, especially, to figure out what the hell that amulet could do besides possibly summon dinosaurs. He took Hawkeye with him to the command center to serve as liaison by attaching himself to one of the aviation units; Clint could get himself a helo and have the run of the sky without needing a lift from one of the other Avengers while also ensuring that the military elements were both feeling useful and being useful. Clint had a good ability to see the larger picture from on high, not always a given with a sniper used to viewing the world through a scope, and his regular-dude-with-a-bow fearlessness often had a better morale effect than Captain America barking out orders. Steve's orders would be followed, unconditionally at this point, but he knew from his war that regular units worked better alongside specialized ones if they didn't feel like they were the chorus girls dancing in the background. 

"Cap, we've got the dinosaur parade going in the right direction," Sam reported in about an hour into the action. Steve was riding along in an Army humvee, chasing the airborne Thor and Namor as they clashed, verbally and with brute physical force, across northeast Houston. They were trying to guide Namor toward the parks and away from the civilian populations and away from Galveston Bay, just in case he really did have some control over the water. "It's not gonna be pretty, but ETA at the bay is probably three-oh mikes if nobody gets distracted by anything shiny." 

Even odds whether the Hulk or the dinosaurs would be so distracted. 

"Roger that," Steve confirmed. "Hawkeye, get those Ghostriders ready to go when they get there." 

There were two pairs of AC-130s making great circles over the Gulf of Mexico, waiting for permission to rain devastation upon the dinosaurs once they were in the water. Steve wasn't a fan of destruction for its own sake, but the first time he'd seen a Spectre Gunship in action had been an impressive day. Air support, close or otherwise, had been one of the biggest changes in warfare since he'd come forward in time, to go from not being able to risk daylight bombing runs during his war to having a jumbo jet able to fire precise bullets from thousands of feet up in the air now had required more than a little adjustment on his part. 

"Thor, how are we on convincing Namor that the oil spill wasn't an act of war?" he asked once Clint had confirmed the instructions. There hadn't been a lot of sense in what Namor had been raving about all morning, but that much had been sussed out and, while he hadn't said so explicitly, it was their leading theory for why he'd chosen Houston instead of, say, New York or Tokyo as his attack point. Galveston might've been more obvious, but Houston was bigger. 

"He does not care," Thor answered after a few minutes, during which Steve's humvee crossed on to a sidewalk to get around another massive traffic jam. There were a lot of abandoned cars, which had made things worse in terms of evacuations of civilians and containment of the threats. "He views the heedless exploitation of resources as a continuous affrontery. The oil spill was notable for its degree, not its novelty. His grievances stretch back centuries, it would seem."

Thor sounded a bit weary. Not physically so, although he'd had quite the battle with Namor so far, but rather of the rhetoric of a madman. 

From the gunner's position, Corporal Hernandez called down that he could see Thor at their ten and they made the left turn accordingly. Tony, who'd volunteered for search-and-rescue but had spent the last twenty minutes shoring up a skyscraper that had taken a hit from one of Namor's lobbed projectiles announced that he was free and Steve told him to see if anything else needed doing on the construction or SAR front first but otherwise find Thor. Who had successfully maneuvered Namor over Sheldon Lake State Park and, hopefully, could keep him there for a while. 

Namor took a dive into the reservoir and came out looking refreshed, which wasn't good, but also a lot less wild-eyed, which maybe was. Steve caught up to him and Thor inside the park, leaving Captain Dorfenberg to set up and maintain an infantry perimeter while he made his way on foot to where the two were standing near the edge of the water and heard from Clint, who said that the aerial bombardment of the dinosaurs in the bay would be starting in about ten minutes, once the dinos were a little further out into the water.

When Steve broke through the the tree line, moving slowly and carefully so as not to startle anyone, Namor looked annoyed to see him and Thor something closer to grateful and bemused. 

"You are not supposed to be here," Namor accused, glaring at Steve, who held his hands up in a "I mean no harm" gesture. His shield was strapped to his back and while he carried a sidearm, he didn't think that raised his threat level to Namor any.

"I'm just here to help," he said easily. "You have a list of grievances, can't hurt for someone else to hear them, too." 

"You are not supposed to be here," Namor repeated, this time sounding less accusatory and more... not distracted, but less focused somehow. Like he was listening to something else and Steve hoped he didn't have super-hearing and could tell that there was a battalion's worth of soldiers positioning themselves to hem him in. 

"I'll leave if you want me to," Steve said in the same careful, calm tone. "But I think I can help you get what you came for."

The gemstone amulet was starting to glow brighter and Steve realized at the last moment that Namor wasn't listening to the soldiers in the trees, he was listening to the stolen sun around his neck. He unslung his shield and pulled it around to defend himself from the blast of orange light as he heard Thor bellowing; he felt the impact drive him back, rattling through his bones like a shockwave, and he hit something behind him at speed.

* * *

_Everything hurt._

The last thing he remembered was getting blasted into a tree, but it might have been something else because it had clearly knocked him out and the average oak didn't do that anymore. Whatever it had been, he was now he was lying on a stretcher somewhere safe and indoors, although no doubt still in Houston. He was too woozy to open his eyes to see where and even moving his hand on his chest forced out an involuntary gasp of pain. 

"Stay where you are, Cap," a voice ordered him gently from the other side of the room, sounding muffled, like he was speaking underwater. "The Army still hasn’t built any bed you can’t break if you try to and General Sherman might’ve slept on this one."

Steve chuffed out a laugh that sent fire down his arms and legs. Spinal damage, maybe, and he resigned himself to a ride home on a stretcher and an evening of lying on an MRI bed instead of the couch. Avengers Tower had everything, but a way of getting out of medical treatment was not one of them, not with JARVIS able to chase you down.

"Matching museum pieces, then," he said, mostly to see if he could talk without pain. He could.

"Museum pieces my _ass_ , young man,” was the bemused reply from much closer and Steve did open his eyes then because he knew that voice, the timbre and tone and the sarcasm that covered up near-paternal fondness for his younger teammates.

Dum Dum Dugan was sitting on a stool next to him and even in the dim light of a half-shielded kerosene lamp, Steve could see the concern on his face.

It had been a while since he’d dreamed of the Commandos. He’d always been woken up by the nightmare of watching Bucky fall from the train — especially after they found him again as the Winter Soldier — but he’d stopped dreaming as often about the others. He'd felt guilty about that, about abandoning his friends, but Sam had told him to quit it, that this was part of healing and his friends weren’t going anywhere because they were still in his heart.

"We thought we’d lost you, sir," Dugan said quietly. "Helluva fall you took. You’ve been out for three days. We moved you while we could, but you were getting worse, so we set up shop here and Dernier and Morita went ahead to rustle up some help."

Steve, feeling tears prick at his eyes, could only offer a weak smile, not trusting himself to nod or speak. He didn’t remember any falls like this, so maybe it was his brain accommodating his modern-day injuries. Nobody knew how brains worked, something he’d been told constantly as they’d searched for Bucky. Maybe he was hurt worse than he’d thought and he was already back in New York.

Or maybe Thor’s stories about the orange gem that could control time were true.


	2. Chapter 2

"Heard you stirring, sir. Dum Dum sent me in to make sure you didn't get any ideas."

Steve looked over as much as he could without turning his neck too much -- it still hurt, although the pain was no longer racing down his limbs. He would be able to move if he had to, but he didn't have to just yet and it made everyone else feel better if he didn't.

"Hey, Gabe," he greeted Jones, who was carrying a bundle wrapped in waxed cloth like it was a baby, not bothering to get offended because indignation would be a wasted effort at this point and he needed his energy for other things. The newsreel-watching public and the average GI might think Captain America was invincible and indestructible, but the Howling Commandos knew better, knew that he bled and ached and could wear down, could break. They were not only not expecting him to rise up in fighting form a few hours (days) after waking up from a severe head injury, they would also be pissed if he so much looked like he might be considering it, which was why Dum Dum was rotating babysitters through the day. "You find a new toy?"

It had been easy enough to pass off his confusion and disorientation as concussion-related, to get Dugan to tell him the date (19 November 1944) and where they were (a long-abandoned hunter's lodge in the woods somewhere between Nancy and Verdun). He still had no idea if he was back in time or caught in a dream, but he was willing to buy the former. Not only because of Namor's words and the dinosaurs he'd left behind in 2014, but also because if this were a dream, something to occupy his mind as he healed, why would he have chosen a point in time after Bucky fell and not a happier era? The winter of '44-45 had been terrible, cold and bloody and full of pain as they'd fought the Battle of the Bulge and their own grief and there was no way he would have chosen this as a respite, no matter what the state of his subconscious.

"Not my toy," Gabe scoffed, but he did it fondly. "Morita picked something up when he and Jacques went looking for supplies. Supposed to be getting in contact with base camp -- radio reception is crap here, sir -- and finding something to eat and they came back with this puppy." He unwrapped the package, now sitting on a table, and revealed it to be a German radio set. "It's one of the new models, not even put together yet, and it has the instructions on the back plate. And I'm the team sap, apparently, because nobody else will help him."

Jim Morita could fix anything with wires or tubes or batteries, had a remarkably deft hand for finding radio frequencies, friendly and not, and was the best driver among them on the rare instances when they had a motor vehicle to borrow or steal. But while he'd picked up enough French to get by and was the only one among them who could speak any Spanish, German had remained beyond him except for some choice insults, none of which were likely to be included in the directions for a radio set. Jim's response had always been the same when confronted with written German on anything from cans of ham to unexploded ordnance: if they'd printed them out in Japanese, he'd be fine. Which in a few decades would be exactly what would happen and Jim would, in fact, be more than fine. But right now, it meant him begging -- or usually trading chores with -- another Commando to handle the translations.

"I hope you got something good in the exchange," Steve said, pushing himself a little more into a reclining position -- he'd been flat on his back for most of the two days he'd been awake -- until Gabe gave him a warning look that he shouldn't try for too much more.

Being confronted with all of what he'd once thought lost -- even after Bucky's reappearance in the future -- hurt like salting a fresh wound, far more than the pounding in his head when he tried to sit up or the burn between his shoulder blades where there was apparently still an impressive set of bruises. He hadn't forgotten his Commandos teammates, their smiles or what they liked or disliked or the way they laughed or cried, but he hadn't kept the memories of the little things -- Morita's inability to master even basic German, Monty's habit of intentionally whistling out of tune, the way Jacques always cut apples off the core instead of eating them out of hand -- in any place where they were easily accessible to him. His memories of them were a little idealized, not covered in the grime of living rough and out of each other's pockets where they could piss each other off and make each other laugh a million different ways and would do either just to pass the time. It felt unfaithful, in its way, like he was realizing that he was remembering the heroes on the pedestals at the Smithsonian instead of the actual flesh and blood men he'd known.

"I am now the proud owner of half a bottle of honest-to-goodness cognac," Gabe replied with a smile. He was the team connoisseur, a role Monty would protest but not too much because he might've been born to the best situation of all of them, but Gabe had done the most with what he'd had. "Not brandy, not that weird hooch they make in the Dordogne, but actual cognac."

Steve smiled. "You'll have a few friends tonight."

Gabe looked up from where he was already starting to scribble out the translation. "If you think I am giving Dum Dum Dugan, a man who could not appreciate the difference between cask-aged Bordeaux and rotgut three weeks off the vine and dosed with paint thinner, a taste of something so precious, sir, you got hit harder on the head than we thought."

It was a lie. Gabe would give some to Dugan, but he'd also give him crap about it before, during, and after because Dugan, whose edges were not nearly as rough as he pretended they were, would play his role, too. Dum Dum had stepped up a lot after Bucky's fall, accepting the promotion to sergeant he hadn't wanted and had spent conspicuous effort working to prevent because the Commandos had needed a new team sergeant and there had been nobody else to do the job.

"Been hearing that a lot the last couple of days," Steve replied, starting to feel overwhelmed again. He'd kept his distance from the others as best he could since he'd woken up, pretending to sleep or that his head was hurting so that he didn't have to talk so much -- or to listen. It wasn't the same as when he'd woken up in 2011, but it was just as devastating. Maybe even more so because his return was destroying everything he'd come from, everything he'd clung to. By returning to 1944, he'd regained most of what he'd lost when he got thrown into the future, but it wasn't the same because _he_ wasn't the same and it was deeply uncomfortable for that. Like an Oracle of myth, everything was tainted by his knowledge of the future, by his fear of changing it -- and his desperation to do just that.

In November 1944, Bucky had been 'dead' for three months, almost, and it was killing Steve to lie on a rickety cot in France knowing that right now Bucky was alive and being tortured and abused in Poland. Natasha's file, for all of its Soviet provenance, had been very thorough on the Winter Soldier's HYDRA origins. Bucky was in a HYDRA facility outside of Oppeln, in Silesia, and he would be there until the first days of April 1945, when he would be transported, in cryostasis, east to the brutal hands of Department X and the Red Room. Right now, though, he was HYDRA property, being turned and twisted and molded into their image through rough methods -- electroshock, sensory deprivation, physical torture they knew he could withstand because Schmidt's scientists had already completed what Zola had begun in Italy, and psychological torture made more efficient because of Bucky's amnesia. He was in a hell he did not fully understand and Steve was in his own version of it because he had to leave him there, at least for now. The cost was too high otherwise. If this wasn't a dream, if he were really back in time about to relive the Battle of the Bulge, then he could not deviate from that. Historians on all sides were unanimous in the importance of the role that Captain America and the Howling Commandos had played -- would play -- during those months, how they'd saved thousands of lives in a battle where there were more than 90,000 Allied casualties. Steve couldn't abandon those men, couldn't sacrifice them all for just one, even if that one was Bucky. He had to leave him there and hope that Bucky would forgive him when it was over, hope he could forgive himself.

"On the other hand," Steve said, not wanting to dwell any more, "if you give Dugan enough booze, he'll maybe let me get up and walk around when it's not to go piss against a tree."

Gabe snorted without looking up. "I'd have to give everyone a good shot for that, sir, and I don't think half a bottle's enough to make all of us silly enough to let you wander around unattended. You were puking yesterday, sir, and that was just to stand up to water a tree."

The lodge had two rooms, the smaller one Steve had been recuperating in and the large one that was kitchen and bedroom and office for the others. They couldn't keep fires going during the day because the smoke up the chimneys would be a beacon for the enemy, but they were all pretty good at banking embers by now and while the others kept warm by keeping busy and wearing all of their clothes at once and the odd nip of brandy, Steve was simply buried under rough wool blankets that smelled of damp and horses. He shifted those now to free his hands and Gabe did look up then, just in case Steve was considering a jailbreak, and Steve frowned at him.

"Just the once," he said, making a show of re-settling himself. "We should be underway in the next day or two. Not today, but we are going to be late enough back to Paris as it is that they might turn us around at Reims."

Their schedule in the fall of 1944 had been much tighter and more regimented than it had been at any other point during the Commandos' history. Most of it was because they were working off of the intel Zola was providing, the breadcrumbs he'd give them that they'd then mix with what they were getting from other sources and turn into actionable intelligence that would, almost a year later, give them Schmidt. The rest of it was because of the cost paid to get Zola in the first place: Peggy and the others had wanted to keep them busy once they got back to work after Bucky had been killed, giving them specific tasks instead of the more general "go out and wander into HYDRA bases" guidelines they'd been operating under so that there were objectives to meet and deadlines to follow and not much time to dwell, either literally or emotionally.

"Had plans for Thanksgiving in Paris, sir?" Gabe asked, bemused. "I think Eisenhower's gonna have to cancel it this year unless he expects us to eat our shoes and say a blessing for it."

There'd been food and fuel and munitions shortages on the lines since the summer and if the Commandos had eaten better than the average grunt, it was because they had spent those months working with the various Resistance groups instead of Big Army. And, more importantly, because they had Jacques, who gave the Commandos a credibility within France that a half-dozen Americans and a Brit couldn't have managed on their own no matter how renown their deeds -- and who could charm the average farmer's wife out of an extra sausage and bottle of plonk with little more than a smile and a story. Most of which were even true because Jacques Dernier had led quite the life before he'd thrown his lot in with the Free French and then found himself a Commando.

"We weren't getting back to Paris by Thursday anyway," Steve answered. Thanksgiving 1944 the first time had been spent in Suippes, a quiet day they'd mostly ignored the significance of until Jacques and Monty had returned from an errand with a bottle of whiskey and a still-bleeding goose. "But there are advantages to being in the same room when the Powers That Be start deciding where we should be."

It wasn't that Peggy and Phillips and the others intentionally wasted the Commandos' time or that they were sent on pointless errands to keep them from getting into trouble, but... the resulting missions were usually more efficiently plotted and thoughtfully planned if Steve and one of his sergeants were there to more reasonably manage expectations. Neither Bucky nor Dugan were (had been) shy about expressing their dislike of too-ambitious proposals, either by elbowing Steve hard in the ribs to speak up or, if he didn't, fidgeting enough in their seats until someone asked if there was a problem, Sergeant, and they'd begin with an apologetic "With all due respect, sirs and madam..." before cutting whatever was under discussion into tiny ribbons. Which didn't mean that those missions were scrapped -- or sometimes even modified -- but reminding those who sat in bunkers and map rooms about how things were likely to play out in the mud and open air was never a bad idea. Steve had understood it back then, but he'd still been a little eager to please, a little afraid that if he spoke up too much, he'd get taken out of the field or put under a commander who would not put up with such polite insubordination as Phillips, who was always willing to at least listen. Now, however, he would probably have little compunction about speaking his piece without any elbows in his ribs to prompt him.

"We already know what they want us to do, sir," Gabe pointed out, crossing something out thoroughly and then rewriting it. "Find HYDRA, kill HYDRA, and try not to blow ourselves up in the process... I am going to know more than I need to about crystal oscillators by the time I am done with this."

Armed with knowledge of the future, Steve knew it was both more and less important that they get back to Paris promptly. The Germans would be breaking through the Allied lines in the Ardennes in a month's time and the Commandos would be sent out as part of the response, so being at Reims would be closer as they'd been in Paris last time. But if there were any way he could slip in a little warning, a little bit of pretend-to-have-overheard details that would allow the Allied forces to shore up the initial attack points even a little to reduce casualties, Steve owed it to the men who would die defending Elsenborn Ridge to do so. But that was a month from now and probably more than time enough to get back to Paris no matter how slowly Dugan made them go in deference to Steve's injuries; in the meanwhile, they had to complete the current mission, which had mostly been a headcount of the various Resistance forces and a watch for the vanguards of the anticipated German forces, especially the SS and HYDRA elements that were not bogged down by micromanagement from Berlin and had been slipping units into Allied-held territory from pretty much the moment the Allies had first held it.

"It wouldn't hurt to have two of us who know how to work that thing if we're going to carry it around," he pointed out, since Gabe was waiting for a comment. "Or are we trading this for Thanksgiving dinner?"

They were not above donating or bartering away found tools or tech or materiel to useful parties -- for food, often, for intel or assistance, frequently, to curry favor or build up an ally worth cultivating, on occasion. Which might have been why nobody had wanted to help Morita before now -- it was something he was going to get to play with for a few hours before it was handed off to someone else.

"We might be trading it for what we've got now," Gabe admitted and Steve frowned, since what they had now was entirely because of him and his injuries. "But Jim wants to test it out, get a sense of its value so we aren't handing over a diamond for a couple of stew rabbits and some sawdust saucissons."

It was not, it turned out, a diamond. Steve was in the main room when Jim finished putting it together and deemed it interesting, but exactly the kind of work that had the Germans losing the war. "You could drop it from a plane and it would work fine," he sniffed. "But Veronica could run rings around it with two of her crystals missing."

Veronica, named after Miss Lake, was Jim's baby, a Frankenstein's monster of a machine that seemed to have components from every radio in US Armed Forces use and defied any kind of description save to say that she was petite and homely and Jim loved her more than any real woman, named Veronica or not. (He'd certainly had his hands on her more, as the others were quick to point out.)

"I am shocked at your assessment," Monty said dryly as he dished out 'stone soup,' their most frequent meal and the reason Steve had been allowed out of his quarantine to sit with the others by the fire. It was a collection of whatever they could get out of the locals -- a turnip here, a carrot there, a potato here, a bit of ham bone there -- and whatever herbs and bits they could find or had brought with them. Occasionally, it meant that everything tasted like rosemary because that's all they had, but tonight, at least, it was more than palatable and not just because there was a bottle of red to share. (Steve used to think that he was imagining it, that the wine he'd drunk in France during the war had affected him more than what he would drink in the future, but it really was more potent stuff, although not enough to fell any of them with a single bottle between six.) The three days in Nancy had been bountiful for more than intelligence and if Jacques had traded away the marjoram in return for something more useful to them, they still had juniper berries and whatever else was rattling around in Monty's blue snuff tin.

After dinner, Steve put off his return to exile by asking for detailed reports on what Morita and Dernier had seen when they'd gone for supplies to help him and what the SSR base camp, currently still in Paris although considering moving closer to the lines, had actually said, instead of what he'd been told they'd said when he'd asked yesterday. Dugan wasn't above such selective editing and sat tonight at Steve's right with not an ounce of repentance to him as the others revealed what they'd hidden. Which wasn't dramatic or shocking or even vaguely urgent once it had become clear that Steve wasn't about to die of a brain hemorrhage. Steve was going to have to check in himself via radio tomorrow during one of the windows, but the plan of action was going to be essentially unchanged: up to Reims, more surveillance and conclaves with the local fighters and then coordinating with the Allied field commanders before returning to Paris. The bulk of the forces were moving south from Normandy and Calais and, soon, from Antwerp, but there were still Allied units coming up from the south and Steve had standing orders to help them out if needed and get out of their way if necessary and he wouldn't know which was the case until he met them.

He was eventually chivvied back to his cot, but Dugan stayed behind and the two of them looked at the maps for an hour or so, figuring out where they should go and how they should get there.

"I do want to get going soon," Steve reiterated, since he was sure Gabe had not passed on that desire. "My head's clear and if we wait until I stop hurting, there'll be a peace treaty first.... unless someone else is hurt, too?"

As team sergeant, Dugan was a little more willing to rat out a fellow Commando than Bucky had been when someone was feeling ill or was banged up or otherwise in less than fighting form, although neither of them ever divulged details if they were at all embarrassing or would risk censure. Even if that censure amounted to Steve giving the guy in question a pained look and a plea for the hangover or the sprain or whatever it had been to be all that had brought back from the brothel. (None of the guys had ever gotten the clap, thankfully, although there had perhaps been a few scares that Steve had suspected but would never have gotten confirmed.)

"Everyone's fine," Dugan assured, meaning it. "I don't think the couple of days' downtime waiting for you has hurt any, mind. Being indoors in this weather's no hardship. A little extra sleep, dry clothes and not having to worry about frostbite, a little less worrying about getting their throats slit in the night... We didn't _need_ the break, but it did us some good anyway."

Steve nodded. "Good. We'll check in tomorrow morning with the bunker and then head out after a big lunch. Let the boys get a belly full of something warm before we go back to humping it through the snow."

* * *

"Soldier, put your head _down_ if you don't want to lose it," Steve called over to the private who was prairie-dogging a little too much for his own safety considering that their enemies were so close and so numerous. The Allies were gaining ground everywhere except in Alsace, where they were still fighting to keep from getting cut off and surrounded by the Germans storming out of the Colmar Pocket with impunity. Steve was moving among the infantry now, but he had arrived in the region with the 12th Armored Division, which had taken some heavy losses in battles the previous month, and elements of which currently had neither the trust of their superiors nor any faith in themselves because of poor command decisions. He had understood why he'd been informally attached to them -- to cure the morale problem and give everyone the sense that someone was around to issue orders that would make sense -- but he wasn't really in the mood to play the rah-rah Captain America higher command had prescribed and so there was a bit more tough love and a lot more sharper commands than the boys might've expected from the newsreels. But after the last few months of heavy fighting in the snow, nobody expected any less and Steve could not give any more. He had already given everything he could and was, he suspected, working off of reserves that were closer to exhausted than he might like.

The winter of '44-45 had been no less terrible the second time around, even knowing what was coming and doing what he could to minimize the damage, which hadn't been much because Captain America's capacity to effect change in '44-45 was very different than it was in 2014. Steve laughed at himself, often bitterly and always in private, when his requests to see generals were denied or his orders to officers in the field were ignored -- it wasn't that he believed his own press releases, but he had simply gotten used to having the kind of power and respect that seventy years of history and legend had inspired, far more so than he'd ever realized. In 2014, Steve could argue freely with the Secretary of Defense and have the Joint Chiefs of Staff hanging on every word; in 1945, his reputation did not outstrip his rank or his relatively late date of commission or the untraditional origins of Captain America. He was respected by many as a small unit commander and covert combat tactician, but he was still hobbled by his USO past and Hollywood taint, his laboratory transformation, and the disdain many of the old guard had for covert operations. It was extremely easy to dismiss the showgirl, the experiment, or the guy who spent his time sneaking around in the dark slitting throats instead of engaging in proper and honorable soldiering. Special Operations might be the sexiest of the military specialties in the future he'd left behind, but in the present he'd returned to, it was considered ungentlemanly at best and either savage or cowardly at worst, the last resort of men who'd lost all else -- including their dignity -- and was capable of no more. Captain America might be good for the public back home, but 'real' soldiers knew better, which was not true within the ranks, but it wasn't the ranks that he had to convince to change their position because history said that the 106th Panzer Brigade was showing up in nine days.

"Sergeant, I want you to move your men ahead two hundred yards and set up prepared to fire south," he told Ginsburg, the NCOIC of the unit. By the time Steve had come across them, they'd already lost their lieutenant, platoon sergeant, and half their number in a skirmish earlier that morning, soaking the knee-deep snow with blood. And so while Steve wanted to move toward the enemy -- a company from the 708th Volksgrenadier Division had set themselves up comfortably half a mile away -- he had to get these boys home instead. They were exhausted, frostbitten, grief-stricken, and running low on ammo and they'd be no help in his fight. "We should be clear, but just in case."

It took an hour to get the fellows attached to another retreating unit and, once they were settled, Steve accepted a tin cup of hot coffee, but refused the hot chow on offer in favor of a K-ration and a couple of Logan bars because it was running short and others needed it more, although he said it was because he could take those on the road and nobody else would eat them if they didn't have to. Which was true enough -- D rations weren't called "Hitler's secret weapon" for nothing -- but he really didn't want to stick around. He was feeling soul-weary and sorry for himself and angry for the latter, so he just wanted to go out and hit things for a while. It wasn't blood thirst, rather its opposite -- he was exhausted by the killing and if he could make it stop, make it happen less, then he would. He was exhausted by everything for more reasons than that he was barely sleeping; he was now closing in on his sixth year of warfighting.

Fighting the Germans again, fighting HYDRA again, was disturbing for more reasons than just than having to relive the unspeakable horrors of war. It was his growing sense of the uselessness of it; he had driven Schmidt's plane into the ice at ease with his fate because it had ensured the failure of HYDRA's great plan and it had come after the death of their leader and his mission, in many ways, had been completed with that act. But it hadn't been. HYDRA had survived and thrived because of the peace he'd helped bring about, and he couldn't escape the feeling that all of this blood -- and he had seen _so much blood_ in the three months he'd been back in this time -- was being spilled in vain. His sacrifice, which hadn't been negated by being defrosted, had been in vain because no matter how many lives were spent here and now, no matter how many were saved, in seventy years and three months, Alexander Pierce would come a heartbeat away from giving Schmidt his victory. And the worst part, if there could be a worst part when every part was so awful, was he wasn't able to do more to change it. He didn't know what he could do or change without adversely affecting the future; was he killing a German soldier whose never-to-be-born child would create a cure for some dread disease, was he saving a man who would go home and commit murder, would keeping Pierce's father from meeting his mother make things better or worse when Pierce had done many objectively good things in the twentieth century? He didn't know the answer and there was no one he could ask.

Keeping everything to himself meant walking a lonely road, one he made even more so by intentionally separating himself from the people who knew him best because there was, he had realized, no way to hide all of the changes three years in the future had wrought on him. Everything about him was different and he couldn't brush it off as just others' perceptions or even provide plausible explanations for most of it.

In the field, he fought differently -- he'd been a puncher and a gymnast the first time, but now he knew capoeira and krav maga and muy thai and jiu jitsu and used them instinctively. He threw the shield differently and with far greater effect. His tactical and strategic skills were far better, as was his ability to command larger units -- he'd already incorporated the lessons learned from his first time through the Battle of the Bulge, plus the Battle of New York and everything that had come after that. It wasn't all improvements, though: he'd used terminology nobody understood and requested tools that hadn't been invented yet and he'd gotten men into trouble more than once for plotting out moves that would have worked easily with twenty-first century technology and tactics but were dismal failures with what the average soldier was carrying and wearing in 1945. But overall, his combat skills had grown immeasurably and the contrast was stark with what he'd been showing before he'd landed on his head outside of Nancy in November. Away from the Commandos, it was easier to pass off as simply him being Captain America, but he wasn't going to forget the not-entirely-pleasantly surprised looks Dugan and Morita had given him the first time he'd dropped a trio of SS brutes with silat moves.

Off the field, which he rarely had been since Christmas, he was different in more ways than he could probably recognize in himself. He knew that the last two months of constant fighting had taken their toll, that eighteen months at war would change anyone and that was to be expected, but there was also the time in the future, three-plus years during which he did not rest and, as Sam had gently guided him to recognize, he had not healed. He was numb almost all of the time, which was a comfort mostly because it kept him from feeling some of the pain he was surrounded by, but it also kept him from relishing the moments of bliss that surprised them all. He could laugh at jokes, had enjoyed himself well enough the one time he'd allowed himself to be taken to bed, and had even cameoed as himself during a USO show in Paris, but it was all still muted and muffled and he was starting to forget what it was like when it hadn't been. The Commandos, none of them unaffected by what they'd seen and done, either, had let this pass largely unremarked because to them, it was a natural continuation of what had been. Steve hadn't realized to what degree he'd been affected by Bucky's death the first time, but it had apparently been more than he'd thought.

He reunited with the Commandos two days later. They had largely stopped operating as one unit after the new year; they had gone ahead early to scout positions and take out vanguards where they could, but once it had become army-against-army, small unit covert actions were less useful and so they'd been moved around to where they could be more efficient. Steve, of course, went everywhere and did everything and could probably have objected more than he did, but he hadn't the first time because he'd been respectful of the senior officers' experience and didn't this time because he was hiding from his teammates and their looks of surprised concern. However, he did make sure, to the best of his ability, that they weren't being ill-used or feeling abandoned by him. Morita and Gabe especially, since their membership in the Commandos had provided them with a layer of protection against the prejudices against a Nisei and a black man in a still-segregated Army; Morita's reputation as an RTO whiz had him roving the front lines keeping everyone's comms up and steady while Gabe had gotten himself attached to the camp of a battalion in the 3rd ID after finding an old high school classmate as the operations officer there. Dernier and Falsworth were attached to French and British units respectively and could not have been happier, to the point that they were apologizing to _him_ for their deep satisfaction at fighting alongside their countrymen once again. (He'd told them to stop being idiots.) Dugan was back to what he'd been doing before he'd been captured in Italy, playing up his legend as a soldier who'd never fit in and never let anyone down -- that bowler hat had been far more than whimsy, a distinctive mark that the rank and file took to mean that he was on their side and the smart officers took to mean he was too valuable to break to the bit.

When the Commandos reunited, it was half by accident and mostly by intent -- they had all gotten orders to hitch up to Antwerp, but doing so together was happenstance. The SSR was still based in Paris, but they were supposed to be meeting agents in Antwerp to get new assignments. The Battle of the Bulge was essentially over, the Colmar Pocket clear, and the Allied armies were on the move into Germany, and that left plenty for those agencies that did their work away from the front lines. They rode up in the back of a covered transport truck, exhausted but content -- with the successes on the battlefield, with seeing each other again, with the promise of resuming doing what they were best at doing. Even Dernier and Monty weren't overly disappointed; the freedom within the Commandos was something not enjoyed anywhere else in any uniform -- Steve held loose reins, something that would serve as good practice in the future when it came to leading the Avengers -- and being back under the structure of a formal fighting force, even one that spoke their own language, had had its downsides. They'd run into each other in various combinations over the last six weeks, but this was the first time it had been all of them together. To celebrate, they all passed out and were snoring before they even crossed the border into Belgium.

Antwerp was somewhere between US Army company town and an old city stretching itself after having been squashed under the Nazis' boots, festive and industrious in a kind of manic way. They were met at US Forces command by an SSR agent they didn't recognize and escorted to a hotel that had enough black market connections to offer real steaks in the restaurant alongside the usual fries and beer. They were elbow deep in all of the above when Peggy showed up with a smirk on her face and a tiredness in her eyes that she couldn't quite hide. They all stood up and Dugan shifted everyone over around the big table so that there was space between Steve and Monty for one more chair. Peggy accepted the seat with grace, the half-pint glass from the publican with somewhat less grace (and a bit of snickering from the table because everyone knew that while Peggy was a perfect lady, she was also a perfect lady who could put away a proper pint of bitters with ease), and took fries off Steve's plate like they were a right as she updated them on where things were within the SSR and its search for Schmidt and the rest of the HYDRA infrastructure.

This wasn't the first time Steve had seen Peggy since he'd been back, nor the third, but their meetings had been thus far brief and distracted by the business of war and espionage. She'd worried over him when he'd first returned to Paris after his fall through time, but they hadn't really had any time to exchange more than assurances that no, really, he had a very hard head in the literal sense, too. She'd put her hand on his hair as if to judge the integrity of his skull herself, even though the bruises were long gone, and he'd closed his eyes at the nearness of her, at what he knew he still wanted so very much now that it was in front of him again. He'd thought about making a move, knowing that it would not be cruelly rejected. Peggy had mourned him as a lost love when he'd died; making what they'd separately wished for real, even for a little while, would not change that. But there hadn't been time or place and then the war, always the war, had taken precedence.

Here and now, two months later, it was almost overwhelming to have her at his side, picking off his plate and pouring beer from his glass to hers because the bartender was going to enforce her ladylike decorum if she wouldn't do it herself. After going so long not feeling anything, not allowing himself to feel anything, it was almost too much and he had to force himself to listen to what she was saying and not bask in her being close enough to smell her perfume.

Peggy left them after she'd said her piece and made them all swear to show up at the formal briefing not too hung over to listen, wishing them goodnight and expressing gladness that they'd all survived and returned safely. Steve stayed a while longer, finally decompressed enough to appreciate his teammates' tipsy antics, before getting up to settle the bill and leave the boys free of officer supervision. He exchanged a look with Dugan, who nodded that yes, he'd keep everyone from overdoing it too much, and then told the table that he was paying for the beer tonight but would not be paying for bail tomorrow.

They had been given four rooms upstairs, the Commandos splitting three between the five however Dugan wanted to do it and one for Steve. He'd bought a bottle of bootleg Irish whiskey when he'd settled the tab and poured some of it now into the tumbler they'd given him. He couldn't get properly drunk, not like he used to and not like the boys were getting downstairs, and beer never did anything for him, but enough hard liquor could take the edges off, soften the world enough to make the points of contact not hurt as much for a little while. And he desperately wanted that respite tonight. 

For all of his bone-deep exhaustion and the first hot, substantial meal he'd had in months, he wasn't sleepy and so he sat at the desk by the window, glass of whiskey at his elbow, and sketched in the pad he carried with him everywhere but hadn't opened in months. He was most of the way through a study of soldiers making camp in the snow in Alsace when there was a quiet knock on the door. Not expecting anyone -- the knock had been far too polite and discreet to be a drunken Commando checking in -- he put down his pencil and picked up his pistol before going to the door.

"Well, that's one way to greet a lady," Peggy said dryly, eyebrow arched as she took in the pistol in his free hand. "Although I suppose it will serve as evidence in the matter I wanted to discuss with you."

He stood aside as she entered, looking out into the hallway for witnesses before shutting the door behind her. He knew that it was widely assumed that he and Peggy were lovers, had known it the first time even as he'd vehemently protested the impugning of Peggy's virtue and honor, but there was no reason to give those rumors fuel because they did not make her life easy even as they added to the legend of Captain America.

The two of them had been ridiculous, Peggy would tell him in the future, each sure of their own feelings and completely misreading the other's until it was too late, and nobody else had quite believed that they had been so blind. He'd been an innocent despite an abundance of physical experiences that should have stripped his naivete from him and she hadn't understood that until the end, instead assuming that he was disinterested in anything more than a casual fuck because that's all he'd ever had. (That Peggy knew his sexual history in almost complete detail, from the actresses on the USO tours to the occasional dalliances with Resistance fighters and war widows, had embarrassed him acutely in the future and she'd laughed at him for that.) Catching him in a clinch with Private Lorraine had been proof for her that he really had changed from the man she’d met at Camp Lehigh, that he was now like every other fellow on the inside as well as out, and that he’d meant to continue as he’d begun with his casual encounters with women who once upon a time would never have looked twice at him. 

Here and now, however, he wondered if history would be different this time around. Peggy had never come to his quarters alone the first time, at least not without knowing that there was someone else there to bear witness to its professional necessity.

Peggy looked around the room now, eyes falling on the desk with the half-empty whiskey bottle and the open sketchpad. "I'm going to tell Colonel Phillips that none of you are going anywhere for a week at least," she began as she crossed over to the desk, her heels clicking quietly on the bare floor. Her fingertip traced over the lines on the page. "You're all at your limits, if not beyond. You shouldn't have been out so long as it was, but there was no way to get you all back once you'd been dispatched. And, I think, if we'd tried, I don't know that you'd have come."

He'd followed her back toward the desk but stopped halfway, keeping space between them. "Jacques and Monty were pretty happy among their countrymen."

Peggy turned to him and frowned. "I wasn't referring to the boys, Steven. That last 'you' was not the plural."

"I was needed," he said simply, since explaining everything else would have been impossible. Even if he could allow himself to reach for Peggy now, to turn rumor into fact, he couldn't allow himself to unburden all that he was carrying upon her. Couldn't let himself speak a word because he knew that Peggy would triumph over the rumors and the skeptics and the institutional misogyny and she would become a Director of SHIELD and he could not risk her so greatly changing the future. It was the reason he hesitated now, kept an invisible barrier between them, because it would be unfair to take comfort in her while still keeping his secrets to himself. It would be lying and he respected her too much, _loved_ her too much, to do that to her.

"You are always going to be needed," she told him, turning back to the sketchpad. "But you are so far past the point where you have what to give that you can barely stand. You've been running on fumes since Bucky Barnes died and you haven't stopped running, not for six months. The others have noticed and you can be damned sure Colonel Phillips is going to notice."

He stood where he was, unsure of what to do or say. "Are you here to warn me?"

Peggy chuffed out a laugh that was almost ugly in its ruefulness. "I thought I might have to," she answered, tapping the page with her finger. "But you are very clearly aware of it. I am here, then, I suppose, to ask you what you are going to do about it."

She looked up at him, almost over her shoulder, and he was startled by the fear in her eyes. He had never done anything to make Peggy afraid of him... but, perhaps, he had made her afraid _for_ him.

"I'm not trying to get myself killed, Peggy," he said quietly.

"You're not," she agreed, a brittleness to her tone. "But you've become completely indifferent to it happening by accident."

He shook his head to disagree, but without vehemence. This wasn't the first time he'd had the accusation leveled at him by someone who was in a position to know. He knew himself that there had been points where it had probably been true, but it wasn't right now. "I still have things I need to do," he said, aware that it was hardly a denial.

"And when they're done?" Peggy asked, right hand moving from the sketchpad to the half-full tumbler, fingertip circling the rim. "What then?"

He shrugged helplessly, unable to lie to her about this. "I don't know."

She nodded, like this was an important confession he'd made and maybe it was. She stook looking at the sketch for a long moment and he watched and waited as the minutes ticked by. Then she looked up at him and smiled tightly and a little ruefully. “You’ve been honest with me and that should be rewarded with honesty in return,” she said, eyes on the tumbler under her fingertips. “I have taken advantage of your... exhaustion, or, rather, I did not protect you from it as well as I should have. Instead of politely turning away, I saw something I am quite sure you meant to keep hidden.”

He froze. There was no way to hide all of the changes the future had wrought upon him, which was why he’d exiled himself from those who knew him best, including Peggy. But there were also the times when he’d been genuinely careless, such as when he’d found himself sketching Avengers Tower on his notes during a meeting and had had to doodle over it to turn it into something less dangerous.

Peggy laughed, this time with amusement. “Oh, Steve,” she sighed fondly. “You look like I said that I'd caught you looking at dirty pictures.”

He blushed a little, although not nearly as much as he once might have. “I’ll confess to that, if I must.”

Dugan had curated quite the collection, which all of them had borrowed at one point or another for personal recreation. They had also traded the pictures as needed for more prosaic needs like gun oil or an extra can of C-rations or eggs from a farmer’s hens.

“You needn’t,” Peggy assured lightly. “But for the record, I would have assumed it to be true.”

He smiled hesitantly at that, unsure of where she was going with this. A direction that became no less clear – or maybe too clear – when Peggy picked up the tumbler and downed the contents in one gulp, coughing a little. She squared her shoulders and turned on her heel and started walking toward him with a purpose. She didn’t look like she was bracing for impact, but something in her posture softened a little when he didn’t back away as she passed through the invisible barrier between them.

“Peggy,” he warned softly as she drew close enough for him to smell the whiskey on her breath. “You—“

She silenced him with a finger to his lips. “I don’t,” she agreed easily. “Nor do you. But I would finish my confession, if you’ll let me.”

He nodded once slightly, not enough to dislodge her finger but she moved it anyway, replacing it with her thumb rubbing softly against his lower lip and her hand cradling his face.

“Once upon a time, I made a judgment about you,” she began, meeting his eyes and holding them. “And you tried to tell me that I was wrong and I chose not to listen, chose instead to see your gestures of protest and your attempts to prove your innocence as their opposite, as evidence of your guilt. And, somewhere along the line, you chose to stop fighting, to protect that truth and hide it away. And I, in my foolishness, took that as a victory. But now you are so worn down, so exhausted, that you can’t keep that truth hidden anymore and I can’t help but see it. See that I was wrong and my victory was a defeat of us both.”

The movement of her thumb against his lip ceased and he waited for her to speak again. The next move was going to be his, he understood that. To accept her apology or not and decide what happened next. She wasn’t offering herself to him. Or, rather she was, but not the way women did in this time and in the future, as something temporary and ephemeral and meaningless. This was her offering up her heart and hoping it wasn’t too late because it had taken her so long to see that she'd always had his.

When she said nothing more, before the silence started to mean something other than what he wanted, he kissed the thumb against his lips. She choked out a laugh and used the hand cradling his face to pull him in and close the distance. He went, mirroring the gesture and smiling as they kissed, months ahead of schedule and far less hurriedly. He tried to keep himself a little bit grounded because this was overwhelming, to finally allow himself to have something he’d wanted for so long, to feel something instead of the numbness. And then he realized what he was doing and let go because why couldn’t he be overwhelmed if it was by happiness?

Peggy left in the middle of the night, her shoes in her hand and a bemused smile on her face as she slipped back to her own room down the hall. They didn’t see each other until the meeting with Phillips and the other SSR decision-makers in town, when she walked in with a stack of files in her arms and archly asked how the Commandos were that morning and Dugan, whom Steve knew to be nursing an impressive hangover, cheerfully assured her that everyone was accounted for and nobody was in jail.

The discussion about what they’d seen and done and what needed to be done next was lengthy but straightforward because Phillips had no tolerance for politicking and would always favor the field operator over the analyst working safely in the bunker. Which might have been why he'd come to Antwerp in the first place. He knew what Eisenhower wanted out of the SSR, which was not necessarily what he was prepared to give the General, but the two weren’t so far apart that it would cause lasting friction. The Commandos were going back to hunting for HYDRA, which Steve was more than fine with. He knew where the bases were and which ones were the dry holes and had enough mission autonomy to favor the former and choose the safest of the latter because those would be the softball missions. Hunting HYDRA would also give him cover for what was his own real next mission: to find and rescue Bucky.

Bucky would be in Poland for another five-six weeks, but getting to him sooner than later was better not only to end his suffering more quickly, but also because Steve only knew when the Soviets moved him, not when he had been found. Steve didn’t want to have to fight off the Russians, putative allies, to get to Bucky because they considered him a spoil of war.

He had already started planning the mission in his head, which was becoming an unintentional mirror of the first time he’d had to spring Bucky from HYDRA captivity, not in the least because he was planning on doing it alone. He knew the Commandos would want in, but he also knew how dangerous it was going to be and how weary they were. This wasn’t going to be one of their usual jaunts behind enemy lines and he didn’t want to risk their lives, even to save Bucky’s. They had wives to meet and children to sire, full lives to enjoy, and he was not going to chance any of that not happening, of changing time so drastically by getting a Commando killed on a longshot mission. And it was a longshot, even knowing where Bucky was.

(He'd justified rescuing Bucky to himself by pointing out that HYDRA would have no shortage of assets to complete their murderous missions and could do what they wanted without the Winter Soldier's help. How much of that was logic and how much of it was selfishness he couldn't say, but he had to believe it. Had to do this. He had sacrificed them both for no good reason -- HYDRA thrived in the future -- and no matter what happened with him, Bucky would not have to bear the brunt of his folly again.) 

Getting to Poland was going to require a plane and a parachute; Oppeln was too far inland to go by sea and too far from Allied borders to drive or walk without running into someone with either the authority to ask him where he was going or standing orders to shoot him on sight. Getting a plane might actually be easier than getting a truck, especially with transport (and gas) shortages. He could hit up the Army Air Corps or the RAF for a lift – they’d trust him even if he didn’t have written orders, especially written orders to a region being assaulted by the Russians. After that, it was going to have to be a bit of improvisation to get to the base and find Bucky, but he was going to need a bit more planning than just winging it to get the two of them back to friendly territory. Especially if Bucky was not himself. Steve knew that he had to brace himself for going in to rescue his friend and finding the Winter Soldier instead, but chose to consider that a worst-case scenario for now. 

In the meanwhile, it was off to follow the French II Corps into Germany.

“This is a lot more fun than the last time we were here,” Jacques announced cheerfully as he rigged the explosives to blow. They were at a HYDRA facility east of Bonn, a small but useful one they’d gone ahead to find while the French were still bogged down by Cologne. It was their third stop and, judging by the haul and the number of prisoners, their last before they would have to return to base. This place, an old estate that was less castle than manor, had been a low-security base, mostly research and documents, no weapons storage or anything too heavily defended, and they’d gotten in before the occupants had realized they were under assault and thus before they had had a chance to fulfill their orders to burn everything before the Allies could get their hands on them.

“Don’t have so much fun that you set the forest on fire,” Steve warned, but he did so with a smile. He had just finished a last walk-through and was carrying a box of papers to be brought back to Belgium for the analysts to read. The others were supervising the prisoners ferrying the rest of the boxes into the rear of the HYDRA truck that had been parked innocently in the estate's garage, leaving Jacques to do what he did best. “Save some for next time.”

“ _Ouais, Papa_ ,” Jacques replied, all insouciant obedience. Steve made a note to himself to make sure the truck was some distance away before Jacques set off his latest creation.

The boys were upbeat on the drive back north, not the least because of their successes, although that hadn’t hurt. Nor had watching Jacques’s fireball turn two different colors before settling into a more traditional red-orange flame as it burned. Instead, Steve suspected it was the return to normal operations, at least by Howling Commando standards, for the first time in months. They were on their own, doing what they did best, and it felt good. It _did_ feel good, he could readily admit, and he’d felt more comfortable in his skin than he had at any point since his return, more present and more alive. He knew some of it was Peggy and having a real human connection again and having that connection be _her_ , but the rest of it was simply getting away from the front. It was doing all of them more good than the week off in Antwerp could explain.

All of which made the scene that occurred back in Belgium that much more of a shock, at least to him.

They’d been back for a day, a triumphant return akin to Santa Claus on Christmas with their truckloads of documents and munitions to be examined and prisoners to be questioned, and there’d been a celebratory dinner that even Phillips had stopped by for and donated a bottle to. Steve had stayed longer than usual before retreating to officer country, which in this case had been a table at the other end of the room with Phillips and Stark, who was in town to play with some of their haul, and Peggy and the liaisons with SHAEF and the others who got their oar in when the SSR came up winners. After that had been a more private reunion with Peggy, who’d remarked on how much less weight he seemed to be carrying on his shoulders. “I’m not trying to carry everything on my own,” he’d replied. “I’m happy for the first time that I can remember.”

The next morning, what had originally been a day off became a day with a meeting at noon in Phillips’s office. Steve had shown up expecting news about Schmidt – it was almost at the point where what Zola had been telling them was going to start paying off there – but instead of Phillips and maybe Peggy, he walked in to see them plus Stark plus all of the Howling Commandos.

His first thought was that this was where they asked him who he really was and what he’d done with Steve Rogers. Especially as he saw the look of hurt and betrayal on Peggy’s face that she was doing a poor job of hiding from the others – if they’d been looking. But everyone’s eyes were on him alone.

“Sir,” he prompted. “Reporting as ordered.”

Phillips turned to Stark, who stepped aside and Steve exhaled with what might have been relief or might have been disappointment when he saw what was on the corkboard on the wall: it was the map of Poland he had been working on, the facility outside Oppeln marked in ink and possible ingress and egress routes done in pencil. It had been in his pack, at least it should have been. He hadn’t looked at it since they’d gotten back and while Peggy might have found it in his room last night, the odds were more likely that one of the boys had seen it while they’d been campaigning, going in to his ruck for matches or money or whatever else. 

“What’s in Poland, Captain,” Phillips asked, more resigned than angry, although he was definitely both. “And why haven’t you been sharing with the class?”

He’d debated lying if he’d been discovered, but had chosen not to. Better to let them think him desperate than to lose their respect. So he looked Phillips straight in the eyes and answered.

"Sergeant Barnes, sir."


	3. Chapter 3

"I know how it sounds," Steve said a little loudly to cut off the protests and murmuring. "I didn't want to believe it, either. I don't want to believe it. But there's enough circumstantial evidence, enough partial evidence, that I have to check it out. I have to see for myself. If there's even the slightest chance that he's alive... I can't live with the uncertainty, with the chance that he might be there and I never tried to save him."

He'd cobbled together a workable cover story already, one that didn't rely on his future knowledge and Natasha's folder from Kiev because even if he hadn't been ambushed beforehand, there would have been a reckoning afterward. As a pretext, it hung together well enough, a combination of plausible if largely unprovable facts held together by Steve's own reputation for data analysis and synthesis. He'd cited rumors overheard on the battlefield, things said by HYDRA prisoners they'd taken, notes he'd seen in some of the places they'd raided over the years, briefings given by the SSR's own people, and Bucky's history as a subject of Zola's previous testing. All of which built up a logical case for another HYDRA facility somewhere in Silesia where Schmidt's scientists were working on their version of the super-soldier serum. Zola had told them that it was happening - this was not speculation, he'd been very clear about it, although not where or how close they were. Steve reminded them of this now.

"We've been looking for a place like this for years," he pointed out, trying to prevent his voice from sounding desperate, like he was pleading. He had to keep to as even a keel as possible or else he'd sound like he was simply chasing his best friend's ghost because he couldn't bear the pain and guilt any longer. Which was true and not; he was as desperate as they feared he was, but he also knew that Bucky _was_ there. "Zola's been feeding us tidbits all along, teasing us about what Schmidt was doing to complete his work. Half of our missions have been chasing down those leads. Why not this one?"

That there were HYDRA sites where the super-soldier serum was being recreated was beyond dispute. That such a site might be in Silesia was also plausible, especially if there was human testing underway because the Nazis considered Poles and Jews to be worth less than animals and both were in abundance there. Also, it was far from the Western Front, which would have made common sense even before D-Day. They were willing to grant him these as facts, or at least as a hypothesis worth investigating further, which had historically been enough to go from guesswork to mission planning. It was the inclusion of Bucky that was making them doubt him, which he understood -- he had never questioned that Bucky had died that day until he'd been confronted by the Winter Soldier in the streets of DC -- but could not let stop him.

"We never found his body," Steve pointed out. "We know HYDRA was in the area when it happened and when we got back there to look for his body. We also know that they wanted him back."

Bucky had never spoken of his time as a test subject for Zola during his imprisonment, although they had known the rough shape of it, known that it had given him ugly nightmares but no special abilities anyone could discern, had instead made his body ache in the cold. So they'd all pretended that it hadn't been any different than the captivity the others had endured, horrifying but _over_. And if HYDRA's offer of a reward for Sergeant James Barnes had been six times what was still being offered for the other Commandos, well, he had been the team sergeant and Captain America's best friend-and-confidante and had simply known more to make him more valuable.

Right now, however, the rest of the Commandos were watching Steve with a mixture of worry and hope. They were the reason he'd been called on the carpet for an accounting and he knew that they'd done so out of concern because they'd seen Steve at his most unguarded and worn down by grief and loss. They'd seen him change almost before their eyes and avoid them and go fight alone until there was nothing left and as frustrated as he was by their actions, he understood them. Respected them because he'd always told them, right from the start, that if he were ever doing something that was going to end in disaster, then they should speak up. And from the outside, without context, he supposed, this might qualify. He just wished they'd come to him instead.

"Sergeant Dugan, you and the boys are dismissed," Phillips said. Steve heard the reluctance in the murmured "Yes, sir," and footsteps heading toward the door but didn't turn around. He wasn't sure what would be on their faces and wasn't sure what he wanted to see there.

Once the door closed softly, the argument went back and forth for the better part of two hours, but Steve relaxed just a little when the main of the dispute turned to politics and logistics and not whether he had cracked up for believing Bucky was alive. Whether he would go with SSR support was not yet a given, or even necessarily likely, but it was no longer being dismissed out of hand. The biggest hurdle to clear was now the consequences of the mission, which Steve could navigate with greater ease than proving himself unaffected by the idea of Bucky being back under HYDRA torture, which he absolutely was not.

The Russians were closer to Oppeln than any SSR resource -- or even any US or Allied forces -- that was indisputable. They were most of the way through their Silesian Offensive, taking back and just plain taking in what would be the first steps toward a Cold War Steve had not lived to see. Getting there first would require fast work and delicate maneuvering because there would be no way to avoid the interpretation that the Americans were stepping on Russian toes in their own backyard.

"If Barnes is there, the Russians will turn him over to us," Peggy suggested, not for the first time, and Steve knew that her arguments had been more than merely playing Devil's Advocate, that she had been looking at this with the cold-eyed pragmatism that had earned her her job and would lead her to a Director's chair in the future. But he also knew that she hadn't changed so much from the woman who'd tricked Howard Stark into flying Steve into enemy territory with even less preparation and likelihood of success because it had been the right thing to do. Because she had had faith in him. "They'll probably ask for something outrageous in return, but it would be a coup for them to show up at Potsdam with a missing American war hero."

Steve, who knew very well that that was not the case, could only shake his head. "I don't want to bet Bucky's life on that."

In the end, it came down to whether the SSR wanted whatever might be in the lab in Oppeln to fall into Russian hands. And the answer to that was easy.

"I want to make something perfectly clear, Rogers," Phillips said without a trace of humor or warmth in his voice. "One of the reasons I am letting this mission go forward is that I know that you are going to go anyway and I would rather deal with the fallout of the Russians throwing a tantrum at SHAEF headquarters than have to tell Eisenhower that I let Captain America sneak off and get killed."

Steve might not have been able to keep his face schooled to the sort of neutral that went with getting dressed down by a senior officer because Phillips scowled.

"I don't like this mission," Phillips went on. "And I'd throw you in the clink for the duration to keep you from running off if I didn't think those yahoos undoubtedly waiting right outside wouldn't break you out in a heartbeat."

Steve did smile a little at that, but it was a bit wry and not the proud smile he usually ended up with even when he was explaining why he'd had to rescue one of the Commandos from the MPs for completely frivolous (he was sure) drunk-and-disorderly charges.

"I don't believe you've got any evidence whatsoever that Sergeant Barnes is alive, let alone that he's being held in a facility in Poland," Phillips continued sourly, but then his tone softened. "I also know that you had just as little evidence last time and not only found Barnes, but you also rescued four hundred POWs and ended up with a half-dozen followers who happily went through hell for you. So you'll get what you need for this because you are owed a little faith."

Off to the side, Peggy was smiling as if she'd known this would be the outcome all along and Stark was showing the same amused smirk that Tony would employ to such effect decades later.

"Now go outside and let those followers apologize," Phillips said gruffly because he hated showing his soft side. "Jumping over your head tore 'em up and you're gonna need to air everything out before you go anywhere."

* * *

"Jesus Christ, Sergeant, could you be any less graceful?" Steve asked with mock exasperation as Dugan untangled himself from his parachute. Everyone had landed safely in a tight grouping, but Dugan's chute had caught a tree - not enough to hold him up, but enough to make his landing awkward and require him to yank it out of the branches. Dugan was the least experienced jumper, having gone through Airborne School and then promptly deciding never to do _that_ again once he'd gotten his wings, and while that had probably had nothing to do with his complicated landing, that didn't mean the others couldn't give him grief about it. "This is what you get for not practicing since 1939."

The others laughed as Dugan explored his entire vocabulary of Gaelic cusswords, dealing with their chutes (wadded up and hidden under ground coverage) and reshuffling their gear from what had been efficient packing for an airdrop to what could be easily carried on a long night march over uneven ground. Jim gave Veronica-the-radio a once-over while Gabe and Monty broke open the crate of weapons, tossing Jacques his supply of 808 explosive, which he stuffed into his field jacket pockets, and distributing rifles and extra ammunition. Steve's materiel request list for the mission had been longer than usual and with a much more overt emphasis on destruction. They would take what they could - Bucky first and foremost - and destroy the rest so that the Russians got nothing. Possibly up to and including any scientists.

He had been a little surprised by how unbothered he was at this last directive, something he'd expressed to Peggy, that he was too hardened to still be the good man Abraham Erskine had implored him to be with his dying breath. Peggy had shushed him and assured him that this was not the case at all -- else he would not even be expressing the doubt.

"You are still very much a man of kindness," she'd said. "More so than most. You care deeply for the innocents caught in the crossfire, the helpless victims, the collateral damage that this kind of total war inflicts upon people with no ability to protect themselves. But what you _have_ lost is your innocence and Doctor Erskine knew better than to expect that to be permanent. He knew with horrible intimacy where you would be going and what you would be facing and he had faith that your innate goodness would remain intact even as so much else would be burned away."

What had been burned away, he suspected, was his ability to empathize with the enemy, which had happened long before he'd found that enemy flourishing within his own house at SHIELD. He'd seen too much indifference to pain and suffering, too much willingness to go along with abominable ideas, to think the best of his opposites. It had made him a better fighter, but also a more ruthless one and he couldn't quite accept that as an improvement.

"Everyone sorted?" Steve asked when it looked like the extra gear had been stowed on the appropriate persons. "Then let's go."

The apologies and explanations had been awkward and on both sides. Dugan had taken the blame on the Commandos' part for the decision to go to Peggy, who in turn had gone to Phillips (Steve did not ask who had found the map, it was irrelevant and Dugan never would have said), while Steve had in turn apologized for excluding them from a plan to rescue Bucky, whom they missed too. He wasn't sure whether they quite believed that Bucky was going to be at the lab, but they'd all seen too much to dismiss it out of hand and, as Steve had pled to Phillips, they could not have abided not knowing for sure. Which left Steve praying that they - and the timeline - would survive the experience.

The mission planning itself had been straightforward and low-key. They were not oblivious to the possibility of spies in their midst - Steve sure as hell kept in mind what Kim Philby had turned out to be, but he didn't remember all of the names of the others, plus whoever might already be working for HYDRA - and so the planning had involved as few people as possible and a lot of false paperwork to secure the munitions and the plane.

Eight days later, they were tramping through the forest in Poland.

Steve took the lead because he had the best night vision; he missed the night optics available in the future, for all of their limitations. He missed a lot about the warfighting technologies, from smart bombs to secure radios that stuck in your ear and didn't require your RTO to be laden like a pack mule and choose between keeping his radio from banging against his pack every step or easier access to his extra ammo. But for all of the ways the future had come up with to make killing more efficient, it had also made war much easier to survive and that, he thought, was what he truly missed. During his time in Alsace and Belgium, he'd seen dozens of mortal wounds that would have been survivable in 2014, either through medical advances or simply the means of quicker evacuation and treatment. Or might never have occurred in the first place with body armor. And then there were all the new and better ways to help those that would survive get on with their lives -- Sam had gone from literally plucking the wounded off of the battlefield to a more metaphorical version of that same task with the VA. Steve had been a model case of refusing to accept that help, but he appreciated that it existed for those who would and he wished some of it were available for Bucky. When they got him back tonight -- he couldn't make it an _if_ , not when they were less than five miles away -- he would probably need more than Steve could give him, more than any of them could give him or had given him last time.

"Count off," Steve ordered quietly as he paused them on the side of a clearing. He waited until he heard Gabe, who was playing tail-end Charlie, before shifting his pack slightly and setting off again. "Got another hour's march to go, boys."

Steve had been vague in his warnings about what kind of shape Bucky might be in when they found him, not wanting to get too specific about things he had little plausible reason to know but unwilling to leave it completely to discovery upon encounter because of the chance that they might be encountering the Winter Soldier and not Sergeant James Barnes. The Winter Soldier didn't exist as a name or a concept yet, that would be the Soviets' doing, but Bucky had been exposed to mental and physical conditioning for at least six months and there was every likelihood that he was close enough the Winter Soldier for it not to matter if he didn't answer to the name. They'd packed clothes for him to wear, a standard field uniform with appropriate rank insignia and "Barnes" hastily stenciled on the jacket, but Steve had also quietly packed enough tranquilizer to fell a horse just in case Bucky wasn't going to be compliant. Leaving him behind -- or letting him get away -- was not going to be an option.

They needed almost two hours to get to the edge of the trees near the castle, the maps and second-hand terrain reports had not taken into account what the Germans had done recently with the Red Army closing in. There were guards on the parapets, four that they could see and probably more that they couldn't, and two more guards -- with a dog -- smoking in the dim light by the massive front door. Steve took the last to mean that they weren't worried about a night assault.

"I hate it when they have dogs," Monty sighed behind Steve's left shoulder, his field glasses held up to his eyes. With no easy or obvious way to silence it temporarily, they would have to kill it. "This one looks mean and hungry."

"I don't think the dog is the only one," Jacques piped up. "They're probably smoking because they can't eat."

The Allied lines weren't the only ones who'd endured food shortages. Here in Poland, at the end of what had been a historically brutal winter and far from both the front lines and the homefront, the shortages would be acute. Especially because HYDRA generally fared no better than any other part of the Wehrmacht when it came to supplies. Zola had complained about Schmidt being completely disinterested in the networking necessary to secure additional food sources, unwilling to butter up either senior officers or Party bigwigs early on and instead thoroughly alienating both.

"Morita, get Veronica set up so we can check in," Steve said, stepping back so that Dugan could raise his glasses and take a look. "Monty, Dernier, you're with me -- we're going to make a long pass around so we don't get surprised by what's hiding in the rear, maybe find a better ingress point. Gabe, you and the good Sergeant will keep Jim and Veronica company. Password is 'Brooklyn.'"

They moved silently through the trees once Dugan had taken charge of the scene. Jacques was the nimblest of them all, especially over rough terrain, while Monty was the quickest after Steve. They leapfrogged through the forest, hand-taps on shoulders in passing because it was too dark for signals, as they made their incomplete circuit around the estate. The castle was surrounded by forest on three sides, but there were open spaces between the trees and the house on two of them, one a barren field plowed into rows for planting and the other the remains of what had once been a French-style garden that had gone to seed. The third side was going to be the best angle of approach because it had a decorative path lined with what were probably fruit trees that, even bare for winter, would provide enough cover in the dark to hide any motion from the guards in the parapet. There was no ground lighting, either electrical or with torches, more than a few feet from the castle, but the waxing quarter moon was high -- Steve had refused to wait for a new moon -- and the glint of moonlight off of a rifle or a piece of equipment would be enough to draw eyeballs to them in the darkness.

They returned to where they'd left the others and Steve laid out the plan. The tree-lined path led to the back garden, but there was also a way to peel off to the left and approach what looked to be a kind of service or tradesman's entrance and that door would be less fortified than the heavy ones at the front entrance with its driveway and lanterns and guards.

"They walk the dog all the way around," Dugan confirmed. "But on a schedule, I bet, because they keep looking at their watches and telling the dog to heel. On the bright side, we should be able to boost as many vehicles as we want -- they're all nicely parked for easy in-and-out."

Jim had gotten through to their relay contact and confirmed that their route out -- another plane, this one courtesy of the OSS -- was gassed and ready. Steve didn't know where it was taking off from, but apparently pretty damned close by because the agreement was that it wouldn't take off until the scheduled mission launch time, which was 0330 local.

Mission kickoff wasn't until 0345 because Steve wanted to make sure they weren't about to stumble into a shift change of the guards. Once that was made clear in the negative, they locked and loaded and made their way down the tree-lined path in silence. Steve had his shield unsheathed and a pistol in his other hand; small arms would be better in close quarters unless they came upon a patrol in a hallway, so Gabe was the only one with his machine gun ready.

The service entrance was a simple thin wooden door, like on a regular house's side door. It was locked and Steve stepped aside so that Jacques could pick it, which took a couple of moments but saved them a lot of noise. They had no idea of the layout of the place, which was dangerous at best, but Steve was willing to bet everything on Bucky being below ground or along the west side of the first level since it had only one window along the entire side but had to have more than one room.

They got through the door into a kind of mud room and then there was a short corridor to what looked to be a pantry and then, beyond it, a kitchen. There were voices in the kitchen - Steve knew from the future that scientists and engineers kept odd hours - and the sound of tea being made and consumed; the speakers were German and they were worried, but about the Russians and the rumors of how close they were and not anything going on tonight. There was a kind of resignation to it, not panicked or desperate, but more like the sad regret at the end of a baseball season. This one wasn't a winner, but the team was still good and there would always be next season.

Steve took a step back as if to distance himself from what he was hearing and nearly stepped on Gabe, who did not mistake the frown on his face for anything but what it was. He'd heard it all, too.

A voiceless whistle from Dugan, who gestured once he'd gotten Steve's attention toward the corridor that did not lead to the pantry and held up two fingers and then indicated that they were civilians, which in this case would be scientists. Steve nodded and Dugan tapped Monty on the shoulder and the two of them slipped off.

Steve harnessed the shield and kept an ear on them while watching the pantry corridor; they could hide themselves from direct view, but noise would be noise now that the kettle had finished whistling.

There were muffled sounds from where Dugan and Monty had gone, but nothing loud or sharp and, moments later, Morita was tapping him on the shoulder and indicating that they should go the same way, which led to a large storage closet with a slop sink and mops along the far wall and two middle-aged men in casual clothes being held in choke holds.

"They don't know anything about a Sergeant Barnes," Monty whispered in a tone that clearly expressed his disbelief. "They're being quite cagey about prisoners in general."

Steve exhaled through his nose loudly and held his pistol to the head of the closest one, the one Dugan was holding still and silent. There was no point in playing coy. "Wo ist der Cryostasis Kammer?"

Morita wasn't the only one wondering what Steve had said, but the two scientists knew exactly what he meant. Downstairs, he was told. Steve asked how many guards (none) and whether anyone else was there (not at this hour) and so Steve told them that they were going to take him down there and that's when the fear of someone else overcame their fear of their current situation.

"You don't have to worry about Schmidt killing you," Dugan assured, forearm around the man's neck tightening just that little bit. "Cause any problem and we'll do it first, I promise."

Breier, Dugan's prisoner, and Straumann, Monty's, led them through the corridor and into another hallway that in turn led to a simple wooden door to the lower levels. Gabe went first, Browning at the ready in case there was a trap, and the others proceeded in a silent and macabre parade behind him. The basement had electric lights, which they turned on, and seemed as expansive as the footprint of the building above it, with its own hallways and rooms and benches and cabinets.

"Gabe, you and Jacques start hunting for files we can take," he said quietly. "I don't know how much time we're going to have once this gets exciting. What you can't carry, get it ready to burn."

Jacques could get very creative with the Explosive 808, but sometimes a convenient Bunsen burner would do. Gabe gave Steve a look, silently imploring him to reconsider and let them go along to find Bucky. Any doubts that they all might have had had about whether he was here seemed to have vanished.

"We need this, too," Steve reminded him. "So they don't do this to anyone else."

Jacques pulled Gabe gently by the elbow into the first open room. The others proceeded down the hall and around a corner before going in to a room on the left. Straumann turned on the light and they all froze. At the far end of the room was the cryo tube, a propped-up coffin that looked like a cross between the Egyptian sarcophagi in the museum and a submersible and, even at this angle, they could see Bucky's profile in the window. It was more horrifying in person than it had been in the photographs in Natasha's file; the ghostly paleness of Bucky's dead-alive face wasn't a trick of the camera here.

"Holy Mary, Mother of God," Dugan muttered.

"Get him out of there," Steve said angrily, unable to take his eyes off of the tube's window. "Now."

Breier and Straumann were released from their restraining grips and given hard shoves toward the tube, but they stumbled and stopped on their own and looked at each other. Jim, the Commando closest to them, held up his pistol and gestured toward the tube. "Captain said _now_. Please."

Breier, with Dugan trailing behind, started toward the cryo tube and began to undo the pressure seals, of which there were six. Straumann went to a fridge, followed closely by Monty. Steve positioned himself in between, gesturing for Morita to keep an eye on the door.

Straumann removed a pair of brown bottles on a small tray from the fridge, taking them over to a table and reaching for a wrapped syringe on another tray, pausing frequently to show Monty that he meant no harm. "He will need the injection," Straumann explained in halting English. "To wake up."

"He'll wake up later, then," Monty said, pulling the tray away from Straumann, sliding it along the table toward himself. "When nobody has to inject him with anything."

Straumann held his hands up in a defensive position, but his words were forceful. "If he does not receive the injection immediately after he is removed from the chamber, he will die. We need to… boost his heart so that he can breathe enough air and get enough blood to his brain."

Monty looked over at Steve, who nodded agreement. This had been in Natasha's file, that emerging from cryo-sleep required some kind of adrenaline cocktail that had been refined over the years, along with the rest of the cryostasis procedure, but had never been rendered obsolete. Monty pushed the tray back toward Straumann, who took it and began to prepare the syringe.

The last pressure seal fell away and Breier waited for Straumann to join him with the syringe before reaching out to the handle and opening the chamber door with a hiss and a cloud of cold smoke. Steve exhaled loudly, barely able to pay attention to the rest of the room. He could tell that the others were similarly affected, transfixed by the picture developing in front of them. 

Physically, the Bucky in the tube was somewhere between Sergeant Barnes and the Winter Soldier. His hair was long, but not as long as the Soldier's had been. Steve had never seen the Winter Soldier without clothes, but this was probably the same; Bucky had been rangy and leanly muscled, not the solid and sculpted physique on display here, which was not as big as Steve but clearly engineered if you'd known Bucky before. The most notable difference from both 1944 and 2014 was the left arm, which was partially intact; the prosthetic began just above the elbow. Steve knew from Natasha's file that the Winter Soldier had lost the rest of his arm in an explosion in Laos in 1971, but Steve hadn't really gotten used to the idea of a metal arm at all and this still looked strange even with two human shoulders.

Breier removed the series of electrodes pasted to Bucky's shaved chest and then stepped back as Straumann gave the injection. Steve holstered his pistol so that he would have two hands free, but he didn't think Bucky would be violent right off the bat; the HYDRA scientists were too calm for that.

Bucky opened his eyes with a gasp and a full-body shudder, but there ended his animation. He stayed where he was, fitted into the cryostasis tube like a tool in its case, with not so much as a twitch or a turn of his head to take in his surroundings. His eyes were open but unseeing, focused but on nothing, as he waited to be told who he was and what he was to do. Like the 'standby mode' on electronics in the future that had perplexed Steve for the longest time, either it was on or it was off, how could there be a between? But now he understood. 

It was possibly even more heartbreaking than just seeing him through the tank window and Steve accepted, for the first time, that Bucky's mind might have been so badly damaged that there was no full recovery possible. He didn't care, would never care, but the dead-eyed expression he saw now scared him more than the machine-like coldness of the Winter Soldier ever had. Judging by the murmuring around the room, it was disturbing the Commandos as well. 

"What the hell did they do to you, son?" Dugan asked softly. He was the closest to Bucky and started to reach out, then stopped. In the final briefing, when it had just been the Commandos, Steve had told them of the tranquilizers he was carrying and warned them that there was a good chance that Bucky would not recognize them as friends and might react violently to being told that he was supposed to. While the advanced mental conditioning that had cemented the Winter Soldier's loyalty to HYDRA was decades in the future, Steve could take no chances here. 

He walked carefully around both Dugan and Straumann and, with clearly telegraphed movements, put his left hand on Bucky's right shoulder. The motion hadn't drawn any reaction, but the contact did and Steve bit back every ugly and anguished thought in his head as those blank eyes turned to him, dull and incurious. 

"Come on, soldier," he said in a calm but firm voice, the one he used on the battlefield with shocky soldiers and scared civilians. "It's time to go."

Bucky was biddable once he stepped out of the cryo chamber, letting Dugan towel him dry and put him in clothes. Dugan and Monty had to cut off the bottom half of the left sleeve of the uniform shirt since Bucky's prosthetic wasn't as streamlined as the one he would wear in the future and had some kind of hose attached; they were able get his arm into the field jacket without a problem. 

This passivity was par for the course, Breier and Straumann offered nervously in German; it took time for the cryostasis drugs to clear his system, by which point he had already been transferred to the programming department, which was where the violent outbursts were more likely to occur. 

"No shit," Dugan spat out as he stood up from tying Bucky's boot laces. 

Steve turned to Breier and Straumann. "You can either come with us or we'll kill you right here," he told them in English, then switched over to German so that there would be no misunderstanding of the terms. "If you are going to come with us, you are going to make it worth the effort, so take what you need from here and pack wisely. If at any time you become more trouble than I deem you worth, we will kill you. Do you understand?"

He had no doubt about their agreement; their failure to either stop the Commandos from stealing Bucky or raise an alarm would have them dead by HYDRA's hands long before they had to worry about the quality of mercy of the oncoming Russians. He didn't especially want to be burdened by prisoners, but these two might be necessary in treating Bucky and, undoubtedly, they would have a wealth of information for the SSR about HYDRA's research. 

"Jim," Steve called over once Breier and Straumann gave their assent with fervent nods. "Find Gabe and Jacques and tell them that we're ready to go. We'll meet you by the stairs."

Morita muttered a "yes, sir" and headed off at a jog. 

Steve took Bucky's right hand and led him closer to the door, mostly to get him out of the way of the two scientists as they scurried around for papers and whatever they were collecting as payment for their lives. Monty stayed close, supervising, and Dugan crossed the room to stand near Steve and Bucky, watching the latter with more sadness than concern. Bucky's hand was still in Steve's; he didn't grip it, nor did he pull away, just let it be held as if he had no say in its disposition.

When Straumann and Breier were done stuffing their briefcases, Monty pulled out two pairs of handcuffs and attached each man to his luggage. It was entirely to keep them from having the cases ripped away by pursuers or accidentally dropping them on the run, but the two men took it for something far more sinister and nobody felt obligated to correct them. 

Dugan, meanwhile, found a large bottle of cleaning solution with a warning for flammable contents and started pouring it around the room, especially in the cryo chamber, where he left a stick of dynamite to be ignited once the fire reached it. 

"Let's go," Steve said once everyone was ready, pulling Bucky gently along. Bucky walked alongside him without hesitation; if he had had any realization that his current handlers were not allied with the ones who'd previously woken him up, he showed no indication. His only quasi-independent act was to turn left when they exited the room when Steve meant to go right. 

"That's the way to the programming laboratory," Breier explained. "That's where he goes after he wakes up."

Steve squeezed Bucky's hand to keep him from going any further, but also because it hurt him to see that Bucky had no memories of anything or anyone, friend or foe, no reactions to anything going on around him, but he knew this. "That's not your mission today, soldier," he told Bucky. "We have to go somewhere else."

Bucky didn't so much agree as fail to continue trying to go where he'd been going and let Steve tug him toward the right. 

They found Gabe and Jim waiting without Jacques, but the two of them had that familiar grin on their faces that Steve knew to interpret as another Dernier masterpiece of fiery destruction in the making. That grin faded sharply once they saw Bucky -- or what was left of Bucky. Steve looked away.

"How much time?" he asked once Jacques backed out of a nearby room hunched over as he laid a trail of the glue-like solution he'd gotten Stark to make for him. (Howard, like Tony, was generally always up for some pyrotechnics.) 

Jacques stood up, stretching his back, and took a moment to consider the line of dun liquid he'd set down. "Five minutes, plus ou moins."

Next to Steve, Dugan sighed a little because Jacques reverting to Fringlish meant that he really had no idea.

"Right, then," Steve said. "Gabe, lead the way."

They were just as strange a procession up to the main level of the castle as they had been coming down: Gabe with his machine gun, Steve with his shield out and Bucky tagging alongside, Dugan and Monty with the prisoners, and then Jim and Jacques bringing up the rear. They made it up the stairs and out of the tradesman's entrance without detection, but once outside ran straight into the dog and his handler, which blew their cover completely and spectacularly even though Monty got the dog after the second bark. 

"Get to the vehicles," Steve ordered. Their initial plan, to retrace their steps on foot to the pickup location, had probably been shot even before their discovery, what with two prisoners and Bucky's incapacity to slow them down. But if they could get to the trucks parked up front, they could maybe get themselves a bit more time and space before the explosion in the castle provided a hopefully useful distraction to any pursuers.

Of course, getting to the vehicles required moving around to the front of the castle, toward the guards instead of away from them, and into the light. But Gabe's Browning and the advantage of surprise -- the Commandos knew what they were going toward, the HYDRA guards had no idea what they were running into -- made things a little easier. So did, it turned out, having one extra gun in the fight. 

Bucky, who had walked along unresistingly and allowed Steve to pull him against the wall as they hid from a wild fusillade of bullets, was not as uncomprehending of his surroundings as they'd thought. As they got to the end of the side wall, they paused before turning the corner to the front and the battle that waited for them there. In a smooth motion, Bucky grabbed Steve's sidearm from his hip and fired up, two shots, and Steve could tell that they were both good ones from the clatter of two HYDRA energy weapons clattering to the ground. Without any change of expression, Bucky handed Steve his pistol, picked up one of the HYDRA weapons, checked it, and brought it up to the ready position. 

Stunned, Steve exchanged a look with Dugan before holstering the pistol and swinging his rifle around. "Thanks," he told Bucky, who ignored him and proceeded to fire only at the enemy as they pressed their way deeper into danger.

They made it to one of the trucks with only Monty getting hit, a graze in the triceps that looked worse than it was once they were underway and got his jacket off to check. The explosion went off while they were still on the driveway heading toward the main gate, a blast big enough to rock the truck and light up the inside like it was day. 

"What did you do, you crazy Frenchman?" Gabe called from the front cab, where he was driving with Dugan riding a very literal shotgun. "Did you use _all_ of it?"

At the back end of the truck bed, rifle up to fire at anyone who got close enough to be dangerous or maybe just close enough to be seen, Jacques smiled. 

It was, in truth, a very Commandos performance -- like the Avengers, you might not know when they were coming, but you sure as hell knew where they'd been -- and Steve found himself turning to Bucky with a smile on his face, the way he always had during the 'escape like bats out of hell' portion of their missions, the way he continued to do, in vain, in the months after Bucky had fallen. But his smile disappeared now because even though Bucky was here once more to be a part of things, it wasn't Bucky and Steve was confronted with the same blank, impassive look he'd been seeing since this version of Bucky had woken up. 

"Cap, got our ride, sir," Jim called from his corner of the truck bed, where he'd set up Veronica to see about the rest of their escape. "They'll be ready to land as soon as we light our lamps."

Their retrieval point wasn't an airfield; it was a field-field that hopefully didn't have any rocks big enough to blow a plane tire and definitely didn't have any markers to make a night landing -- it was still enough before nautical dawn to matter -- without them setting up torches. 

"Hopefully, they'll be looking on the right patch of land," Monty gritted out, very much in pain but equally aware that there was nothing to be done about it until they were safely away. He'd already made all of the mandatory 'English stiff upper lip' jokes. 

"The OSS has to be good for _something_ ," Steve replied with a tone that he doubted the sentiment, mostly for yukks but also because they'd been screwed by the OSS before. "I'm sure they're flying _somewhere_ over Poland."

Monty smiled weakly and Steve gestured for him to lean forward and take off his coat so that he could examine the damage. 

"Can you hold this?" Steve asked Bucky, holding out the flashlight. Bucky took it without comment or any other reaction, holding it where it needed to be as Steve picked out the bits of cloth he could find before splashing iodine on it and wrapping it tightly. 

Gabe got them to the airfield in one piece and, thankfully, without running into any Wehrmacht patrols that were close enough to notice a black man at the wheel in the pre-dawn gloom. (Steve would normally have taken that into account, but needs had musted and Jacques, the only other obvious candidate with Dugan being reserved for gunner duty and everyone else tasked, had been the last one to make it to the truck.) They kept Breier and Straumann in the truck, along with Bucky chaperoned by Monty, while the others paced out the distances to light up their makeshift landing zone. 

Ten minutes later, they heard the distant buzz of the plane and ten minutes after that, they were aboard and taxiing for takeoff. 

Their first flight was to Malmo, Sweden. Steve let Dugan do his thing as babysitter/cheerleader/medic/jailer (in the case of Breier and Straumann, who huddled together in the rear with their cases full of barter) and went up to the cockpit to borrow the radio and make his initial report back to the SSR. Peggy was manning the radio at their end, no surprise, and she did not hide her relief. He was vague about Bucky's condition, but he knew that Peggy -- and Phillips and Stark, undoubtedly listening in -- would understand more than he was saying. 

They were on the ground for three hours in Malmo, enough time to piss and grab food. After making sure that there was hot food available to everyone, even the prisoners, Steve patted Dugan on the shoulder and told him he'd be back in a few. And then he went running around the perimeter of the airfield, at speed so as to prevent anyone from trying to join him. It was partially to stretch his legs -- he'd spent the flight sitting crammed on the floor next to Bucky -- but mostly to clear his mind. 

He'd done what he had set out to do once he realized when and where he was -- Bucky was out of HYDRA's hands -- and he wasn't sure how he felt about that. Relief, absolutely, but it was tempered by the pain of seeing Bucky as he was and how he might be forever more -- the cryostasis drugs should have cleared his system by now and there should have been _something_ , some reaction to his volatile environment if not the familiar faces. Steve was afraid to ask Straumann and Breier why there hadn't been, afraid that they were going to tell him that this was all that there was. 

And then there was the future. By history's reckoning, in March 1945 Captain America had precisely one major event left to his schedule: to go down with Johann Schmidt's plane in the North Sea. There were things he would do before then, of course, but none of them of such -- or much -- import. A few HYDRA bases, a lot of public appearances, an invitation to the Potsdam conference that he would accept but not live to attend. He had not allowed himself to think about it, about how much he still owed to history and his friends in the future, not when rescuing Bucky had to come first. But now it was done -- barring a problem on the flight to England -- and the shadow of the twenty-first century was stealing a bit more glow from what should have been a bright success. 

When he got back to the others, Dugan informed him that Bucky had been fed and taken to the john ("Didn't have to hold it for him, thank the saints.") and that there was plenty of food left over for him. 

"I'm not hungry," Steve said and Dugan gave him the look all good NCOICs gave their officers when they were being idiots. 

"That's not what I was asking, sir."

When they got back on the refueled plane, there was a pile of only-slightly musty wool blankets, enough for everyone. Steve gave one to Bucky, who accepted it with his usual indifference and allowed himself to be led to a bench and sat down upon it, the blanket folded on his lap. Steve sat down next to him, Dugan on the other side of Bucky, and closed his eyes. He hadn't expected to fall asleep, but apparently he did, since he needed to be woken up by the crew chief hours later to be told that they were landing in twenty. 

Steve thanked the sergeant for the news and looked around at his team. Next to him, Bucky sat staring at nothing with the blanket still folded on his lap, but everyone else, including Breier and Straumann, were huddled under their blankets and asleep. He let them all be, figuring the landing would wake them -- that, or Dugan's well-applied boot.

Peggy and Phillips were there when they landed, along with a few intelligence types and Stark, the last of whom surprised Steve a little. They were all visibly shocked to see Bucky, even though they obviously knew he was with them -- the final proof of Steve's unbelievable hunch, maybe. But that shock turned into something closer to horror as they saw the true magnitude of what had become of Sergeant James Barnes, the expressionless, reactionless impassivity that no amount of warning could have prepared them to face. 

Steve presented himself (and, to an extent, Bucky, since he was still holding his hand) to Phillips, who nodded gravely. "Let's get you boys settled."

Breier and Straumann were turned over to the intelligence types and the Commandos split between two jeeps with Steve and Bucky following Peggy and Phillips to the third. Peggy sat in the rear, on the other side of Bucky -- still holding his blanket -- from Steve. She leaned forward a bit to look past Bucky to him and he met her eyes, but shook his head because he couldn't talk just yet. She let it go because she could see the unshed tears. 

"Why don't I take that from you," she said instead to Bucky, touching his hands on top of the blanket. "I don't think you'll be needing that anymore."

Bucky let her take the blanket without reaction and Steve saw Peggy bite her lip a little before turning away. 

The SSR facility at Lakenheath was a squat building at the far end of it, still under the protection of the airbase but otherwise completely isolated. It was a two-story building with a trio of makeshift bedrooms on the top floor, two of them crammed with bunk beds and the third a singleton, as if there would be a VIP who would actually prefer to stay there than somewhere nicer. Peggy led Steve and Bucky to this room, the other Commandos trailing behind while Stark and Phillips went wherever they went before Steve could hear Phillips's footfalls as he came up the stairs. 

Bucky stood by the bed, awaiting orders, and Steve tried to take heart in that Bucky was at least looking around now even if he wasn't moving to do so. His eyes lit upon people and things without giving any sign that they registered anything as familiar or even friendly. When Phillips arrived, Bucky observed him with a little more attentiveness, like he knew that this was who was giving him his orders now. As if that was all that mattered. 

Steve turned his head away and he felt Peggy's fingers gentle on his wrist for a moment before they disappeared. 

Phillips stepped right up to Bucky and told him that he was to rest now but that he would work tomorrow. Bucky didn't react to this any more than he had to anything else said to him, but then Phillips tried something nobody else had. "Do you understand me, son?"

"Yes, sir." It came out rusty and hoarse, but none of them cared because this was the first sound he'd made since that gasp when he'd woken. It was more confirmation that someone, at least, was home in that skull even if they couldn't be sure of anything else at this point. 

"Rogers, with me," Phillips ordered as he left, Peggy already in his wake. Steve didn't want to go, as Phillips must surely have known, but there were too many unanswered questions to wait. This was too big. So he exchanged a look with Dugan, who nodded, and followed behind reluctantly. 

The resulting debrief was long and Steve's relaying of events was interrupted by constant questions and then a break to get food brought in, but it wasn't contentious. Everyone was too grateful and too shocked. Steve gave a truthful and accurate report of what they'd seen and done in Poland, but he fudged a little with some of his sourcing when it came to discussing what had been done to Bucky. Breier and Straumann would be able to give them the details of the science of it, but Steve explained as best he could (without sounding like he knew too much) how Bucky had not simply been a lab rat, that he'd instead been actively conditioned into a weapon for HYDRA. Most of this had been in his original proposal for the mission to Oppeln, but it had gotten glossed over and ignored as rumor and a manufactured justification for a wild goose chase. Now, of course, it was not only true but also dangerously relevant. An exceptionally-trained assassin who could pass for American was hardly a new idea. But to see it reified in the form of another super-soldier, to see how much more of a threat it could be than imagined fifth columnists, was a shock to some of the analysts' systems. 

Steve fought hard to make sure those analysts didn't forget that Bucky was a person, a human being, and one who had lived through unimaginable trauma. He didn't like the way their eyes lit up at having fresh blood to sample and send to the remnants of Erskine's group, at having a chance to play with the prosthetic arm -- Steve glared at Stark until he had the grace to look ashamed -- and he absolutely threatened to take Bucky and run if he thought they were going to treat Bucky anything like how HYDRA had, as an experiment who could follow commands. 

The sun was high in the sky when Phillips finally called a halt. Steve went outside rather than upstairs, needing to decompress before being faced with what waited for him there. Going over everything, explaining in detail just how broken Bucky was in so many ways, and knowing that there weren't the resources to help him as Steve would have wished (or a way to call Sam and seek his wisdom), it was hard to focus on what he'd saved rather than what Bucky had lost. 

Peggy found him, giving him a sour look when he asked how she knew where to look for him, and he asked her the same question he'd been asking himself: why did it hurt so much to get what he wanted?

"Because it's confirmation that there are things worse than death, perhaps," she suggested, taking his hand in hers and squeezing. "Because you feel selfish that this is the cost of him not being dead." 

He wound up sobbing on her shoulder, the tears coming out of nowhere and yet feeling entirely expected. When he cried himself out, she kissed the top of his head and told him to go wash up and get lunch and then get some sleep. 

He did the first but not the second, going instead up to Bucky's room. He opened the ajar door slowly, not wanting to startle anyone, which turned out to be unnecessary because the only person awake was Monty, sitting on a chair pulled up to the side of the bed so that he would be in Bucky's eye line should he wake. Bucky was indeed asleep on the bed, under the covers on his back with his arms over the covers; the others were asleep on the floor, snoring away, wrapped up in Army blankets. 

Steve offered to relieve Monty, who looked worn and, even with his arm bandaged properly, in pain. "The hell you will, sir," Monty replied sharply, then smiled. "I got the first two shifts to sleep. I'll be fine." 

Steve knew better than to fight him over this, so he grabbed an extra blanket off of the foot of the bed and settle down between Gabe and Jim and, surprising himself a little, fell asleep. 

He didn't sleep long. Bucky woke up screaming a couple of hours later, sitting up in bed shrieking in pain and terror. Gabe, whose watch it was now, was already sitting on the bed trying to soothe him with soft words and by firmly holding his right hand, which had started to pull at his prosthetic like he was trying to tear it off. Steve jumped up, shucking the blanket, and moving carefully to the other side of the bed. He needn't have bothered with the care; Bucky wasn't seeing anything despite his eyes being open wide in fear. Steve sat down and took Bucky's face in his hands, trying to still the violent shaking. Bucky shook him free the first time, still caught in the elemental terror that they only wished could be a nightmare and not a memory, but not the second. 

"Hey, hey," he said, using a soft version of his officer voice. Bucky responded to that, turning his head toward Steve without seeing and the screams stopped, replaced by gulping, desperate gasps for air. "You're safe. You're safe."

Bucky's metal hand was free and it found Steve's shoulder, gripping hard, hard enough to bruise and to _hurt_ , but Steve ignored it in favor of repeating his soft entreaties. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Dugan by the door with Jim and Jacques holding the medical staff at bay because all they were going to do was sedate Bucky and that was not what he needed right now, at least not yet. Bucky had had his agency stripped from him for too long and for as long as he wasn't a danger to himself and to others, they would not allow anyone to repeat that violation. 

Bucky was still breathing hard, hard enough that Steve was worried about him hyperventilating, so he took a chance and pulled Bucky in to him so that Bucky's forehead was in the crook of his neck. Bucky went without protest, his breathing still harsh but not quite as frantic, and Steve stroked his hair and whispered nonsense words, barely remembering to not use Bucky's name. The death grip on his shoulder loosened and then the hand fell away entirely, little whimpers replaced the gasps, and they stayed that way for a few minutes. Steve could feel Bucky getting himself back under control, so he didn't hold on when Bucky pulled away to sit up on his own, instead watching and waiting to see what this horrible episode had wrought. 

Bucky's eyes were still wild, but there was a clarity to his expression that had been utterly lacking until now. He looked like he was seeing for the first time, head on a swivel as he took on the room and its occupants, but then he returned his gaze to Steve and Steve _knew_. He felt tears prick at his eyes, but didn't dare blink them away while Bucky stared at him. 

"You're real?" Bucky asked, his voice wrecked from the screaming, low and ragged and quiet. 

"I'm real," he confirmed, fighting a smile. Bucky seemed to be doing the same until he saw his left arm out of the corner of his eye, turning and raising it slowly with a horrified look on his face and flexing the fingers in turn. 

"I didn't want this to be real," Bucky said in the same whisper, then leaned back and turned his face into the pillow, closing his eyes and curling himself up into a ball. 

None of them got any more sleep. Instead, they sat quiet vigil as Bucky wept.


	4. Chapter 4

The next few days were terrible. Bucky swung wildly between grief and terror and catatonia and then lucid periods where he asked questions and they gave him answers that triggered either tears or silences or both. They took turns trying to get him to eat, or least drink water, but he threw most of it back up, and when the exhaustion of all of it became too much, he slept until the nightmares came and began the cycle again.

Steve and the other Commandos sat watch with him in pairs in turn, allowing the others to eat and sleep and answer questions from Peggy and Phillips and Howard and the intelligence types, now more numerous because everyone from Eisenhower on down wants to know what the hell had happened in Poland. They would have all stayed with Bucky if they could have, but it was exhausting and even Steve took his turns to sleep in one of the bunk beds next door. It felt a little like he was abandoning Bucky when he did so, especially the times he woke up to hear Bucky screaming in the next room, and none more so than when Bucky was calling for _him_. He felt guilty every time he went outside to run; Peggy fairly kidnapped him and took him off-base to a pub for a meal among civilians and he couldn't do much more than shovel in food and wash it down with pints of bitters that did nothing.

There was no question of trying to debrief Bucky now, at least for anyone who _saw_ him, but many of the factotums who'd traveled out to Suffolk hadn't seen him and didn't appreciate that their requests (demands) were being denied. Did the SSR not know for whom they were speaking? Steve made himself available to all of the questioners to buy Bucky time, pointing out that he'd seen enough to be useful and had answers to the most pressing questions, answers that Bucky himself didn't have because he'd been out of his mind for almost all of it. Which wasn't true, but was effective in the short term for thinning the crowd.

"He remembers everything," he confirmed when Phillips asked privately. "That's the problem."

The doctors and nurses who came by to tend to Bucky were watched closely by his guardians after Gabe had caught them drawing blood to be sent to the scientists working on recreating Doctor Erskine's work. As practitioners, they had a terribly limited available repertoire -- all they could offer to do was sedate Bucky when he got very agitated, which none of the Commandos would allow. Bucky's sleep was no more restful than his waking hours and trapping him in that state was no favor. The doctors had also wanted to run intravenous fluids to counteract the dehydration, which would have been a good idea except that the needles and tubes gave Bucky flashbacks to both his torture at Zola's hands in Italy and his conditioning from Poland and whatever physical benefit it would have offered was more than offset by the emotional distress. In the end, their best and most useful action was to find an Army chaplain who managed to pass muster with Dugan, who had very particular and strong ideas on the priesthood's usefulness to soldiers.

Father Leary had been at Bastogne and other places where it would have been easy to say that God had forgotten the address and had emerged with his faith intact, if not his right knee. He was easy to talk to and all of them did, even Steve, who had started off making polite conversation as Bucky slept restlessly one night and found himself, during what turned into a wandering but meaningful conversation, admitting how the burden of lives saved sometimes weighed more than that of lives lost.

Still, Steve was surprised one morning to find Bucky's door closed and Jacques and Monty sitting on the floor outside playing cards.

"A purple stole came out of the magic bag and Dernier fairly dragged me out of the room by my wounded arm," Monty replied, not looking up from his hand of cribbage. His wounded arm was not even in a sling anymore. "One of your archaic rites best done in privacy, I gather. Like wanking."

Dernier slapped him on his good arm, which Monty ignored. He reacted more strongly to the cards Jacques laid down, which won him the game.

"Bucky asked to make confession?" Steve didn't bother to hide his amazement -- Bucky had made a practice of ducking church services long before he'd put on a uniform. But his second reaction was to question his first one. Bucky hadn't yet become the Winter Soldier with his seventy-year dossier of destruction, but they already knew from his nightmares and the things he'd said during his manic waking periods that he'd killed while under HYDRA control. Downstairs, Breier and Straumann had confirmed that Bucky had indeed been 'blooded,' that they'd tested their conditioning and his remembered skills first by having him kill other prisoners and then by sending him on two missions, to Dresden and Prague. The scientists hadn't known the details of the missions save that they had been successful and "the subject" was harder to shut down and put away than usual. Steve knew from Natasha's file that the Dresden operation had been to kill a British spy while a resistance leader had been the target in Prague, but he didn't see the need to fill that gap if it remained.

"Hearing 'it's not your fault' and 'you are forgiven' is a little different coming from a priest than us," Dernier suggested with a shrug as Monty gathered the cards in to shuffle. "Maybe he'll listen this time."

Most of the listening right now was being done on the first floor, where Breier and Straumann had been talking nonstop the entire time. But all that meant was that the SSR knew more about what had been done to Bucky, intimate details that Steve had known about from the précis in Natasha's files but still made him sick to hear spelled out. To hear them spelled out with such casual disregard for the fact that they were experimenting upon a human being without his knowledge or consent and then not only not having any regard for his comfort, but instead to have pain be the _goal_ … It had made all of them sick, even the hardened analysts.

Breier and Straumann, on the other hand, weren't ashamed; they even got excited when talking about how a particular method of conditioning worked better than expected. They didn't sound any different than Tony (or Howard) going on about a new project, really, except Tony had named his robots and might have actually loved JARVIS while these men spoke about all the different ways they used instruments of torture to break a helpless man down to a tool -- one that they put away between uses like a blender. Bucky hadn't even had a name, which was why they hadn't reacted when asked for Sergeant Barnes. He had been "the subject," and all they had been concerned about was getting him to work better, to be stronger, to stop complicating their efforts to strip every last ounce of humanity from him so that he could kill more efficiently.

"You should've dropped those bastards over the ocean," Howard growled as he stalked back and forth outside the building during a break in the interrogation. He was smoking furiously, if such a thing could be done, free hand clenching and flexing. "I treat my _tools_ with more respect than they treated their prisoners."

Bucky had not been the only subject, just the only one who'd lived. The scientists hadn't been too sure how many had died; the number was high and they couldn't agree on it, let alone who the men had been. (Russian POWs and Jews, mostly; there had been a couple of other Allied prisoners, but not more than two, maybe three, none American.)

"He _was_ a tool to them," was all Steve could say, since Howard was clearly expecting some kind of answer that would make sense of it all. The true depravity of the extermination and concentration camps was still coming to light, the sheer volume of the horror still unknown and unfathomable. The world didn't yet understand that what had happened to Bucky had been closer to the norm, not the exception, that these scientists weren't unique in their ability to completely deny the humanity of their test subjects. "It's what they do."

"But why do they do it?" Howard asked, genuinely curious. "How do you decide to... By the time you went into Erskine's machine, we'd spent thousands of hours making sure you'd come out of it alive, even if it didn't work. We fought for a week whether to knock you out for the procedure because we knew we couldn't make it anything less than excruciatingly painful and no one wanted to do that to you. And here they are using pain as a blunt instrument, not even a precision tool. How do you look into a man's eyes and do what they did to him?"

Howard didn't wait for an answer, dropping the cigarette and viciously crushing it under his heel and then turning to go back inside. But he paused for a moment. "I hope we wring them dry and then someone puts them up against the wall. I hope it's Barnes who gets to do it."

Steve watched him go, knowing that in a couple of years, Howard and Peggy and everyone else involved in converting the SSR into SHIELD would not only not put these people up against a wall, they would instead give them new passports and a security clearance. Zola might have been the worst beneficiary of Operation Paperclip, but he was hardly the only monster given clemency for sins that should have never been forgiven regardless of the benefits. He wondered if Howard's current ire would change that, if him and Peggy and the others seeing Bucky, seeing a personal cost to the war crimes, would force them to reconsider, or if expediency would win out the way it had last time, when they'd justified their choices by saying that the other side was doing it too, and worse. If in a few years from now, Breier and Straumann would have office space at SHIELD.

He pushed the thought out of his mind and commandeered a ride to one of the bigger commissaries in a jeep driven by a private, picking up dinner to take back to the Commandos sitting in Bucky's room keeping him company for the evening. There was a dining room in the building, but it only served hot breakfast and lunch; anyone looking to eat after dark was stuck opening cans, which was more or less just the guards and the Commandos, since everyone else went to proper lodgings.

On the fourth day, Bucky stabilized. There were still crying jags, but they were less great sobbing episodes and more quiet moments when they realized that Bucky wasn't sleeping but instead silently weeping. He was lucid and aware of his surroundings and he was keeping food down and while he was subdued and not speaking much, he would answer if spoken to. He was also very embarrassed, which the others dealt with the same way they always had dealt with each other's real or imagined shame, by mocking it, and that worked as it always had and the weight lifted a little. They took him outside for a walk and then to one of the unused rooms for a meal that was just the seven of them and nobody sitting on a bed, the Commandos reunited for the first time in eight months. Bucky didn't sleep through the night that night, but he only woke up once and not screaming, so it counted as progress.

"You need a shave and a haircut, Sergeant," Phillips told him gruffly when he stopped by the next morning, but Steve thought Bucky was the only one who didn't hear the relief underneath.

The order turned into a justification for a trip into town for everyone to have lunch at the pub and Bucky to visit a barber after Steve saw how Bucky reacted when handed a razor. They found a glove to cover his metal hand and a watch cap to hide his conspicuously long hair and a car that couldn't fit seven comfortably but had a full tank of gas. Monty drove because he was the least likely to forget which side of the road to use and because he knew more than just the nearest villages, all of which were crawling with US soldiers, and found them a spot further afield in Cambridgeshire where Americans were still something of a novelty and nobody would recognize Bucky as the presumed-dead Sergeant Barnes. They returned late in the day to an irate Peggy -- they might not have quite secured permission for either the vehicle or the all-day excursion -- but Steve could not even muster up the least bit of repentance.

"He wasn't in danger -- or a danger to anyone else," he told her after he'd been dragged off for a dressing-down. "I think being around people who had no idea what he's been through was a good thing for him. And for everyone else."

Bucky had been skittish, mostly, especially at the beginning. He hadn't done much better when the barber had been holding the razor than when it had been in his own hand, for instance, but he'd clearly been happy to be out and about. Maybe not _happy_ , but relieved, especially as the day had progressed. He'd passed for normal, just another American doughboy once he'd gotten cleaned up, and with the motley crew they were, he drew far less attention than the others. Especially with those others being so boisterous in ways that the beer could not have explained. This was them finally celebrating Bucky's return now that it felt more like a rescue than a recovery of the shell that had once been Bucky Barnes. Steve didn't think Bucky had understood that part, but maybe he had. Bucky had always been remarkably perceptive when he'd felt like paying attention and today, he had watched more than contributed. But there had been actual smiles on his lips and a few real laughs and Steve would withstand any punishment from his superiors for being a little responsible for that, even if it had just been ponying up the cash to pay the tab.

Peggy must have sensed it because she rolled her eyes and shook her head. "Don't make a habit of it," she told him sternly, but he could read her well enough by now to understand that the reprimand was entirely for leaving her to deal with bureaucrats and demanding generals' aides and analysts that were eager to talk to Steve and, especially, Bucky.

"Can I make it up to you?" he offered. "I still have a few pennies left over after springing for lunch. I can buy you a whole Coke."

Peggy found better ways than a warm soda and Steve was happy to pay.

As the week unspooled, Bucky continued to thaw out slowly, to become part of his environment and not just watch it go by him like an inert object unable to understand what was going on around him. It wasn't anything like the Bucky they'd known before he'd fallen from the train, but it was even less like the golem they'd brought back from Poland, so nobody minded in the slightest. He ate, he walked with Father Leary, he forced himself to handle his own shaving, he played cards with the boys. He still had his quiet periods, when he couldn't even bring himself to smile at someone's jokes, but they ignored them and they passed.

Steve had made notes of everything he recalled reading in the PTSD books first SHIELD and then Sam had given him, especially the ones Sam had provided that were for dealing with PTSD in a loved one, and tried to figure out how to apply them in ways he had never bothered to do with himself and had never had a chance to do with Bucky in 2014. It was mostly common sense, with a few counterintuitive ideas just to keep things interesting, and a lot of it they're already doing -- or near enough.

Eight days after their arrival in England, Peggy pulled Steve aside and told him that the time had come to let the analysts talk to Bucky.

"We can't put these people off forever," she told him when he protested. "It's not just that there are gaps in what Breier and Straumann have told us about what was going on in Poland. It's also about what Zola has been telling us and you know as well as I do that anything that comes out of that devious little toad's mouth gets the highest priority."

Steve knew this was the truth, knew that Bucky had information that would be important for dealing with HYDRA and the final throes of the war, but he also knew that it wasn't _essential_ , that Schmidt's plan was still the same and the future was still most probably the same (or close enough). Bucky's healing, on the other hand, was essential, and he couldn't see how this would be anything but an invitation to another night of screaming nightmares as they forced him to relive unbelievable horrors.

"I also think it will be good for him," Peggy went on, holding up a hand when Steve snorted in derision. "Hear me out. First, I think he's waiting for punishment for what he did while under HYDRA's control -- don't scoff. _You_ know it's not his fault and _I_ know it's not his fault, but _he_ clearly thinks it's his fault and he's waiting for the hammer to fall, to be clapped in irons or sent off to an asylum or put up against a wall or whatever's been building in his imagination. It's time to take away that hammer -- let him make his confession, let him see that we know what he was forced to do, and let him see that there is no punishment forthcoming.

"Second," she went on, "I think facing what happened, even if it's just rehashing it for analysts who will take notes and ask uncomfortable questions will make him stronger. In no small part because he'll be doing it away from you."

Steve took a step back. "I'm--"

"Treating him like he's chipped china," Peggy cut him off. "You are protecting him from everything and while the sentiment is noble and one of the reasons I love you as I do, you have to let him take his first blow without you there to deflect it. He's stronger than he looks and I have faith in him. You do, too."

Steve said nothing, not sure what to say. He was angry with Peggy telling him how to tend to Bucky, but it was at least partially reflex and he wasn't as confident as he usually was when it came to knowing what Bucky wanted and needed. The person Bucky was now was a stranger in many ways, all of them heartbreaking, and everything Steve had read about helping PTSD sufferers required you to respect the person they were now and not expect them to be their 'old' selves. He could read people well, he always had and it had saved his life many a time, but he wasn't sure how well he could read Bucky now because he was too close and too haunted by the ghosts of who Bucky had been once upon a time.

"Let him prove himself to his superiors," Peggy went on after a moment, reaching out for his hand, still bunched up in a fist at his side. "Not because they need it from him, but because he needs it from himself. And by doing that, let him prove himself to you. Because that is point the third, Steve. He wants to be worthy of your efforts, of the incredible risk you took to find him and save him once more."

Steve closed his eyes and sighed. "He doesn't need to prove anything to me," he said quietly but vehemently. "And the last time he decided to do that..."

Bucky had fallen from a speeding train.

"You are a hypocrite," Peggy said tartly and he opened his eyes because she was laughing at him. "You, of all people, complaining that someone is doing something unnecessary to prove themselves worthwhile... Tell me, when the rush of emotions from the rescue of the 107th had faded, was Sergeant Barnes really all that impressed with what you'd done to yourself?"

Steve couldn't help but smile ruefully because Peggy knew full well that the answer was an emphatic 'no.'

"Let him do this," Peggy said, taking her hand from his fist and placing it on his cheek. "It will be good for both of you. And I _promise_ that we will take more care than we did in Italy."

The interrogation Bucky endured in Italy after the rescue had been just that -- an interrogation, like he'd been an enemy combatant and not a prisoner of war. He'd come out of it stunned, as if he couldn't believe his own side would treat him so poorly. When the shock had worn off, Steve had expected him to be furious, but he hadn't been, hadn't even let Steve be irate on his behalf, and it had taken Steve far too long to realize that Bucky, still reeling from all that had happened to him - and that had included losing his role as Steve's protector - had taken the interrogators' careless remarks to heart in the wrong ways.

This time, Steve was ready to make sure the same thing didn't happen again, especially with Bucky so much worse off than he'd been in Italy, and so were the other Commandos because they remembered, too. But Bucky didn't come out of the conference room looking too worse for wear. His eyes were bloodshot and his voice was raw and when he smiled at them, it didn't reach his eyes, but he was calm and he moved with an ease he hadn't had in the time he'd been back. Relaxed, maybe, as if a burden had been lifted. Peggy had been right, Steve realized, grateful for it. There was still the rest of the evening and the night to get through, but right now, it was a small victory.

Dugan and Monty had made preparations and so there were bottles of beer and roast beef sandwiches -- the rest of England might be on short rations, but food was plentiful aboard the base -- and they broke in to the room with the projector and watched the copy of _The Princess and the Pirate_ that Morita had 'borrowed' while they ate.

It was a good evening, reminiscent of earlier versions, and Gabe and Jacques had everyone laughing with their (mostly true) retelling of the time when Dugan had found a projector and a couple of cans of film reels in the Nazi spy safehouse they'd raided and he had sworn that they would be blue movies, but instead it had turned out to be some dense Czech family drama that none of them had understood but had all watched anyway because there'd been nothing else to do.

Tonight, Steve watched Bucky and he thought he'd been fairly subtle about it, but most of the way through the movie, Bucky turned and gave him a look and he realized that he had not. He shrugged, unrepentant.

After the movie was over and their mess cleaned up, Steve told the boys to get a good night's rest because it was time to start getting back to work and there would be a hike in the woods tomorrow morning. He was looking at Bucky as he spoke, just in case Buck had any notions that he wasn't included in the plans.

"We'll get you back in time to be locked up with the pencil-jockeys again," Steve promised, since Bucky's debriefing was, necessarily, a multi-day event.

"Yippee," Bucky replied sourly, but he nodded.

In the morning, it was sunny and cold for the season when they met outside the SSR's building. Bucky was dressed in a better-fitting uniform than the one they'd brought for him in Poland, larger to accommodate his new build and with an adjustable sleeve that he could get his prosthetic arm through, and it took Steve's breath away how normal he looked standing next to Gabe as the boys bitched about the early start. Bucky wasn't bitching, though. He was smiling at the griping, but he also looked apprehensive and Steve thought he knew why: HYDRA's work on him hadn't merely psychological. The metal half-arm was the most easily noticed, but that had really been just the start of it and this would be the first time anyone else would see what those other changes had truly wrought beyond merely giving him a physique closer to Steve's than what he'd carried before.

Steve knew what the Winter Soldier had been capable of physically, even allowing for the differences in experience and prosthetic arm. The serum variant they'd given Bucky in Poland was, Steve thought, the last of it and the rest of the Winter Soldier's horrifying lethal competence had been the efficient use of what he'd been given then and there. Here and now, Bucky was stronger and faster and built to endure far greater expenditures of energy and effort than a normal man and how he coped with that was going to be something they needed to figure out. All of them. Bucky, with how comfortable he was with his new body and its provenance, separate but related issues. The boys, with the Commandos' changing dynamic and that they now had two super-soldiers on the team. And then Steve, since while he wanted Bucky back on the Commandos and had only ever referred to them as a seven-man unit since Bucky's return, he couldn't risk the other five men's lives if Bucky wasn't field-ready.

"Let's go," Steve called out, waiting for Jim to finish retying his boot lace for the sixth time.

Two hours later, the sun was high enough to get through the trees and five of the Commandos had had quite enough, thank you, and were talking about commandeering the first vehicle that they spotted to take them back to the SSR building so that they wouldn't have to walk. Steve knew very well that if they'd had to, everyone could have gone another couple of hours at speed and even longer if Steve hadn't kept up a pace that was meant to exhaust. Bucky had his play-date, but the others were still at loose ends and tiring them out kept the potential for shenanigans at manageable odds.

The sixth Commando was neither sweating nor even breathing hard, although he had taken off his watch cap.

"Is this where the two of you run to the Orkneys and back to see which one tires faster?" Monty asked lightly as they emerged from the trees and on to a paved road. "I'll give you an order for a shop in Glasgow if you are."

Bucky had done more than keep pace, his enhanced physiology more than making up for the fact that he'd spent most of the previous week in bed and throwing up everything he ate. The others had griped, complaining that he'd been their best chance at slowing the Captain's brutal pace down to a more relaxing stroll, but whether that had been to cover their own surprise or make him feel better, Steve didn't know. Probably both. It seemed to have worked, at least in the sense that Bucky hadn't shut down or slowed down, had in fact worn a tiny smile as he'd let the others heap complaints and insults upon him.

Steve had no illusions that it would be as easy as this, that there would be no come-down, no crash of realization of who Bucky was now and how he'd gotten that way. But it hadn't happened out of the gate and Steve could take that as a positive. One step at a time, enjoy the good days when they arrive, that's what the books had said, right?

"I dunno, Buck," he said with a speculative frown. "Do you think you can beat me in a race? Haven't since 1943..."

Bucky cocked his head and smiled and, for a second, it was the old Bucky again. "I had a twenty-year winning streak before then," he replied. "Yours ain't gonna last that long."

"Try me," Steve replied, raising his eyebrows in challenge. And then he turned and started to run. He could hear the whoops and hollers of the others and knew that Bucky had started the chase and he laughed as he sped through the trees.

This wasn't them, this had never been them because they'd never been physical equals, never been playmates in roughhousing or stickball. Bucky had always been the stronger one, the faster one, the one to use his physical advantage to get Steve out of trouble, right up until he hadn't been. Their friendship had never been complicated -- or complemented -- by competition. They had never kept score.

But right now, in Thetford Forest, this _was_ them, figuring out who those men were and only pretending to keep score. Steve listened as he ran, but he couldn't hear much over his own footfalls and breathing, couldn't tell how close Bucky was without turning around and that would cost him time. He'd never run a sprint against the Winter Soldier, but he was still longer in the leg than Bucky and, serum or not, he knew that the idleness of the last week would have cost Bucky something even if he hadn't shown it earlier because this would be where he was really exerting himself. In 2014, after he'd been cleared for physical activities once his wounds had healed, it had taken him a solid two weeks of training to get back to where he could consider himself in fighting form, let alone peak conditioning. Bucky hadn't been as poorly as he'd been, but right now, he would still be at less than his best.

Less than peak form or not, Bucky was still an experienced man in the woods and when Steve lost his footing in wet mud near the riverbank -- just for a moment -- Bucky pounced. Literally. Steve barely had time to raise his arm as Bucky came flying at him in a tackle that was more rugby than football, getting him by the waist and lower legs and driving them both into the cold river... where Steve _froze_. He hadn't been conscious for it when it had happened in 2014 and Bucky hadn't been there at all yet, but they had been here before in Steve's head and it was a forceful, unwanted reminder that Bucky wasn't the only one a twenty-first century shrink would have a field day with.

He didn't know what he looked like, but it clearly sent a bad message to Bucky, who started shutting down and backing away. Steve shook himself free of his memories and reached out, grabbing Bucky by the prosthetic part of his arm and pulling himself up as he kept Bucky from running away. When he was sitting up, he didn't let go, instead pulling Bucky into a hug. Bucky went, but held himself stiffly with his free arm at his side.

"I missed you," Steve said fiercely. "I never stopped missing you."

He felt Bucky relax then, not completely, but his other arm came up and around Steve and he held on. They stayed like that for a moment that stretched.

"I'm not the guy you lost," Bucky said quietly into his shoulder. "I'm not the guy who fell anymore."

Steve knew that they had to have this conversation, even if he couldn't explain why the Bucky-shaped hole in his heart was so much older than eight months, but in the middle of a freezing river wasn't the place for it. So he squeezed Bucky tight once more and then pulled away, standing up and offering Bucky his hand, which he took.

"I know," Steve agreed once they were both on their feet. "I'm not the guy you left behind, either. We'll deal with it. We did before."

It was such a hilarious oversimplification that Bucky just stared at him and then burst out laughing. Real laughter, the kind that had been ringing in Steve's ears for as long as he could remember and had still haunted his dreams in the future, and Steve found himself smiling right back.

"You are ever a wonder, Rogers," Bucky said, shaking his head.

Super-soldier serum or not, they were both a little bluish and chattering with cold by the time they returned to the SSR building. But they were also better with each other, more relaxed. Steve hadn't realized the tension between them until it was gone, maybe because it hadn't been out of conflict or anger, had instead been out of doubt and insecurity and Steve had a very poor track record of recognizing those emotions in Bucky because, in his head, James Barnes was the least insecure and self-doubting person he knew. Which hadn't been true then and wasn't true now and was probably violently untrue in the future, but this was his blind spot.

They had started the walk in companionable silence, merely enjoying being in each other's company again, but then Steve had started to speak and, once he did, he found it hard to stop. He told Bucky about what happened after he fell, about how they went back to look for him -- of course they went back -- but it had been too late. About how Steve did his best to fall apart out of grief and guilt, but he couldn't drink away his sorrows and he couldn't let everyone down -- and their friends, who'd grieved for him, too, wouldn't let him try it any other way. And so he'd tried to go on, get on with things, go back to the war, and he'd thought he'd done all right, but now he knew better, knew that he hadn't been anyone's definition of 'all right,' not even close. He hadn't wanted to minimize Bucky's experiences by comparing them to his own or make him feel worse by showing how much pain those who'd been left behind had felt. He'd just wanted Bucky to understand how much he'd been missed, how life had not simply gone on without him for anyone. Especially himself.

"You seem okay now," Bucky had offered, but then he'd shrugged and smiled. "Of course, coming from where I am, that's not really much of a compliment."

"No," Steve had agreed. "Compared to you, I have always looked like the model of mental health."

And then Bucky had shouldered him hard enough to stumble and they'd walked on, smiling.

Whatever Bucky had told Phillips and company over the week of interviews seemed to have put them at ease a little, at least with regard to Bucky's mental state, and Steve stopped getting quite so much friction about the Commandos training as a seven man unit or their trips off base. He still got friction because trips off-base were always an adventure and Commando training tended to interfere with the happiness of unsuspecting bystanders and the occasional USAAF or RAF unit that was suddenly missing equipment, but Steve had long ago gotten used to that. Phillips wasn't nearly as annoyed by them as he pretended he was -- so long as he didn't get any generals sending for him.

Sixteen days after Bucky had been brought back to England, Steve was called in to be issued orders for a Commandos mission that was understood to include Sergeant Barnes. They were to go to the Ruhr valley, where Montgomery and Bradley were cleaning up handily but there was still work to be done, especially by a group like the Commandos.

"We're going fishing in the Rhine and seeing what we catch," Steve explained to the boys when he found them in the room they'd commandeered as their own. He dropped the pile of maps he'd acquired on the table and Jim leaned back to get the tin cup full of tacks and then started putting them up along the walls, leaving space for the inevitable sheets of working paper Steve would stick up along with sketches of plans and lists of objectives and photographs he got out of SSR archives because that's how he worked, visually and occasionally non-linearly. This was also the part that he usually worked on alone, an officer's prerogative and an officer's responsibility. Once he'd organized his thoughts, he'd present them to his team sergeant so that the holes could be found and patched and any truly bad ideas could be smothered in the cradle. During his tenure, Bucky had been as blunt as he'd ever been with Steve about finding those bad ideas or anything else he hadn't liked about what Steve wanted to do, mindful of their relative experience levels and deeming that more important than maintaining the kind of deference and distance a sergeant kept with his CO. By the time the mantle had settled on Dum Dum, however, Steve had been a veteran campaigner and Dugan had spent more than a year under his command and while Dugan had make sure all of the red flags were noticed, he had been less inclined to finely critique Steve's work.

Steve didn't know who would be showing up to nitpick what he came up with here. Dugan had kept the role after Bucky's return, in no small part because Bucky had been in no shape to take care of himself, let alone the others. Steve honestly wasn't sure Bucky was up to it now, but he also knew that the decision was ultimately not his -- this would be a conversation between Dugan and Bucky and he trusted both men to make the right call. In the meanwhile, he had a mission to plan and the others knew it, getting up to go. He told the boys not to get into too much trouble, frowning when their "yes, sirs" sounded less like than promises to obey and more like they would consider the suggestion. 

The first knock on the door was Peggy's, who had been away in London for the last two days. He took advantage of the closed door to welcome her back a little less formally than he might have otherwise, but then they actually did talk about work and she looked over what he'd done so far and what he still needed to ask for from the analysts and the archivists. Peggy was not going to pretend to be a strategist or a soldier, but she had been part of the mission tasking - even if the orders had come from Phillips - and understanding why she and the others had chosen the Ruhr Pocket instead of a dozen other potential hotspots would be to his benefit.

"We think it might get us closer to Schmidt," Peggy answered, returning to the map that had suspected HYDRA locations in the relevant area highlighted. 

Steve knew that about a third of the locations were legitimate, the rest rumor or misinformation, and none of them were important. They weren't useless and going to them would not be a wasted effort, but none of them would get them any closer to Schmidt, either. Schmidt could very possibly be at one of them now, but he would definitely be at a base not on this map, Škrlatica in Slovenia, when June rolled around. "Is this something from Zola or..."

"Or someone whose awareness might be a bit more current?" Peggy finished for him, a wry smile on her face. "It's not from Zola. Personally, I'm skeptical that Schmidt - or anything he valued - would be anywhere so close to the western borders of the Reich as it crumbles. If anything, the recovery of Sergeant Barnes has made me more convinced that we should be looking east."

Steve smiled because he loved her smarts, her intuition, and her ability to combine both. She didn't have the advantage of reading the future as history and she was still the most perceptive person in the room. It would get her the Directorship eventually, but right now, she still had to fight many battles just to be heard and he didn't ask why he was going to the Ruhr area when they both knew that Brno would be more useful than Essen. 

Peggy left him to work because she hadn't reported in to Phillips yet and Steve returned to plotting a winding and indirect course to Bottrop, which was the most valuable of the HYDRA bases in the region. Getting there a few weeks early wouldn't change anything; it was probably being prepared for evacuation at this very moment.

The next knock on the door startled him a little because he'd been caught up in making a sketch of the HYDRA facility at Bielefeld, which was on the map as a valid site but would be re-designated as a dry hole until 1955, when it would be discovered by a construction team laying a foundation for a new building. The secreted entrance had been covered up by rubble and mud after the viaduct had been partially destroyed a few weeks ago. It would be an unpleasant place to visit so soon after because there would be bodies still decomposing; by 1955, there would just be bones. But it would have some useful material that, again, would not make a huge difference in the war and, apparently did not make a difference in SHIELD recognizing the HYDRA infestation in their midst. But there was a lot of it and the discovery would necessitate a return to base, which would become more important the closer they got to June and the discovery of the importance of Škrlatica.

"Enter," Steve called, not looking up from where he was trying to recreate the peculiar subterranean entrance to the facility, which was itself not entirely underground.

He heard footsteps and looked up to see Dugan, who was not looking around with a speculative cocked eyebrow and the pursed lips of an NCO who had come to see what his officer had gotten up to whilst left unattended.

He put the pencil down and sat up straight. "What can I do for you, Sergeant?"

This was about Bucky, obviously, and Dum Dum didn't pretend otherwise. "I think it's time to give Barnes his job back, sir."

Steve nodded and gestured to the nearest stool. "Take a load off," he said, waiting for Dugan to sit. "Before you explain your reasoning, let me say one thing first: Bucky Barnes was a fine team sergeant, but he has also been through hell and I don't want you handing over the position simply because it used to be his or because he and I go back to wearing short pants together.

"I know you didn't want this job the first time and I'm grateful you not only took it when it became necessary, but you did a helluva job when there was so much to do. I didn't make it easy on you, nor did anyone else. I would be honored to finish out this war with you as my sheepdog."

Dugan grinned. "Thank you, sir," he said. "Means a lot coming from you."

He paused then to consider his words. "I'm not going to pretend that Bucky's history -- on the team and with you -- doesn't matter, sir. It does. But I also wouldn't throw him back in the saddle if I thought he couldn't handle it no matter what his history was. I wouldn't do that to the boys -- and, frankly, sir, I look forward to being one of 'em again -- and I wouldn't do it to him. The adjustment's gonna be rough, I won't pretend otherwise. But he was good at the job and, like last time, I think he'll do best if he gets to worry about other people instead of everyone worrying about him."

Dugan liked to play the big, dumb Irishman, thick hands and thick head, but he had always been remarkably subtle at appreciating how things - and people - worked. He wasn't a Pearl Harbor volunteer or a draftee; he'd made the Army a career before Hitler had even set his eyes on Austria. He should've been a first sergeant somewhere by now, the way he looked after his men and his officers and the way he fought. But he'd intentionally sabotaged his career to make promotion an impossibility, choosing to stay as a leader among the enlisted instead of a manager over them, never having to hobnob with field grade officers or worry about headquarters. That bowler hat was no lark and Steve had known what sort of a sacrifice he'd been asking for when he'd looked to Dugan to fill Bucky's place within the Commandos.

"And, speaking freely, sir," Dugan went on, frowning, "what those Nazi bastards did to him also matters. He's... more like you now, sir. Not that that makes him 'not us,' but... he needs to get comfortable with that, too, and you're the best person for that. The only person, maybe."

Being team sergeant would give Bucky more naturally occurring time with Steve, time when others would ostensibly not know whether the two of them were talking about the mission or how fast they could heal from a wound or, even, letting the two of them use what science had given them and run in Thetford Forest until they couldn't anymore.

Steve nodded, these were things he'd thought about, but Dugan's perspective here was probably more important because he had just enough distance to see clearly; Steve would never have that. "Have you brought this up with him at all?" he asked. "I don't think it can come from me."

Dugan smiled. "I'll take care of it, sir."

Which didn't answer the question, but also rendered the answer moot, which undoubtedly had been Dugan's aim.

"So be it, then." Steve held out his hand to shake and Dugan did. "It's been a pleasure, Sergeant. I'll keep the secret of your talents with me to my grave."

Dugan smiled as he stood. "Appreciate that, sir."

He left and Steve returned to his sketch, not stopping until the rumble of his stomach got distracting. He wolfed down a couple of bowls of stew in the cafeteria before returning to the team room and finishing the sketch, pinning it to the wall near the map. The last part to work out was going to be the first stop, a tiny suspected base that was actually nothing of the sort, instead a kind of weekend hideaway/love nest for SS officers near Kerken, just over the German border. It would be a good exercise to work out the kinks of the reformed Commandos -- including their new team sergeant. The intel on the place was entirely bogus, but it all sounded legit and nobody would think twice of him choosing it first nor would there be any fallout for it being a bust.

The new team sergeant presented himself at 1700 local time with a knock on the open door jamb and an apple tossed at Steve's head as soon as he had looked up to see who it was. Steve caught it easily and smiled because, once upon a time, Bucky had always come looking for him with food. (He wasn't hungry all of the time, but Bucky had seemed to like that bit of caretaking. He had definitely liked testing Steve's improved reflexes.) Bucky grinned back, but the smile faded immediately.

"I don't think this is such a bright idea," he said as he came to stand by the table. He had his own apple in his left hand; Steve had noticed early on that Bucky didn't seem to mind the prosthetic much, treated it like a regular arm when it came to everyday tasks -- he was right-handed anyway. And so nobody else had made an issue of it, either. It was hidden down to the wrist most of the time because of the weather, so unless you were looking specifically at his hand, it wasn't very noticeable.

"Talk to Dugan," Steve replied, rubbing the apple on his blouse before taking a bite. "This was his doing. But for the record, I'm fine with it."

Bucky rolled his eyes. "Of course you are."

Steve swallowed his apple piece before speaking. "Buck, do you really think Dugan would've handed over the reins if he didn't think you could hold on to them?"

He met Bucky's eyes and held them, challenging him to look away. Let Bucky see that his faith wasn't blind - and wasn't misplaced. Bucky did look away after a moment, but only to sigh and take a bite of his apple. "On your heads be it."

Steve let Bucky tour the room like it was a museum, examining each map and sketch and notepaper like it was on exhibition, and focused his attention on the route to Kerken and his apple. The Americans and Brits were already in the area, so it wasn't quite the behind-enemy-lines kind of trip they had been taking for most of the war, but it would be complicated in other ways by the massed forces and there were still threats from the Germans, who were defeated but not done.

"You should've let Dugan help you out with this, at least," Bucky said at the last panel. "My knowledge of world events over the past year is pretty damned nothing."

Steve looked up. "You'll catch up," he said easily, making it clear by his expression that he wasn't being trite. "War isn't very complicated, just bloody."

Almost two years ago, Bucky had spoken those words to him when he'd finally gotten what he wanted - a front-line seat in the war - and then promptly realized that he had absolutely no idea what to do now that he had. Bucky had walked him through the basics and then the not-so-basics, using his hard-earned knowledge as an experienced campaigner and NCO to teach Steve how to lead and how to survive. He'd gone over every set of orders with Steve at first, making sure Steve understood what he was really being asked to do and how he should prepare to carry it out and then afterward he'd made sure that Steve could live with the cost of what he'd asked others to do. 

Here and now, it was Steve's turn to return the favor. He got up and walked over to the map that covered the most ground and gestured with his head for Bucky to join him. Once he did, Steve traced the shape of the fighting since the fall (and the Fall) with his finger, outlining the progress of the armies from the north and south and then the Russians in the East. He replayed the Battle of the Bulge in detailed snapshots that time had not dulled in clarity. He showed Bucky how everyone had gotten to where they were now and where they were going.

Bucky had always been a bright guy and, if the serum had anything to do with how quickly he followed what Steve was saying, it would have been impossible to tell.

They were still going over the Ruhr pocket when there was a knock on the door that Steve knew would be Peggy before it opened.

"Oh," Peggy said, covering her surprise well when she saw Bucky. "When I saw Sergeant Dugan with the others, he said that you were still working."

Her tone said what her words didn't, which was that she wasn't sure if Bucky was there in an official capacity or not. There'd been no time to tell Peggy or Phillips about the change, nor had Steve discussed it with either of them as a possibility or as an eventuality. He thought Phillips would be fine with it, but Peggy would possibly be the harder sell despite her very genuine faith in Bucky's recovery.

"Plans are laid out," Steve assured, gesturing at the table. "Just have to put them in order and run 'em through the idiot test first."

He tilted his head toward Bucky, indicating that he was the administrator of said test, which was for how big of an idiot Steve was being.

Peggy's look turned shrewd. "I see."

Bucky chuckled darkly, not missing a thing. "Don't worry, Agent Carter, I'm about as skeptical as you are about this."

Peggy's brow unfurrowed and she smiled brightly. "Oh, I have complete faith you'll find Captain Rogers to be every inch the idiot his plans say he is," she assured.

"Hey, now," Steve protested, but he couldn't pretend he wasn't pleased as punch. Bucky and Peggy had had a surprisingly good relationship before his fall, born of a shared affection for him that they had both masked well as exasperation. Bucky had always flirted with her, but not with any intent, and Peggy had never gotten upset with him for it because he'd always taken her seriously as a warrior in her own right. Seeing the echoes of that in the present made Steve's heart lighter, the two people he loved most getting along. It must have showed on his face because Peggy gave him a fond, exasperated look before wishing them well and closing the door behind her.

"So it seems you left something out of your history lesson," Bucky said dryly once she'd gone.

Steve tried to look like he didn't know what Bucky was talking about, but Bucky had more than twenty years' experience waiting out the truth from Steve and nothing HYDRA had done to him had affected that ability.

"Yeah," he finally agreed with a smile. "But we're keeping it on the down-low, not that everyone doesn't think it's happening anyway..."

Bucky's answering smile was bright as the sun. "About goddamned time, Rogers," he said, hitting Steve in the arm. "Two of you were making useless doe eyes at each other forever. She made the first move, though, didn't she?"

Steve shrugged, which Bucky took as confirmation. He didn't want to go into how messed up he'd been that Peggy had been able to see all that he'd been hiding.

"So let's get back to this business," Bucky said, poking at the map on the wall. "Your gal is probably already in the Colonel's office telling him where I am, so we'd better make you and Dugan not look like idiots for it."

Bucky's official return as team sergeant of the Howling Commandos came four days later, during one of the overview meetings Phillips held to make sure that the left hand knew what the right hand was up to. Steve had already given his briefback to the Colonel, during which Bucky's suitability for return had been discussed -- Phillips was willing to allow it, just wanted Steve to keep a close eye on the situation -- and the Commandos had gone on their first training exercise with Bucky back at Steve's side. This had been the unofficial return and it had been easier and less awkward than Steve had thought it might be -- Dugan had worn his responsibility easily and well, but he looked like a younger man without it and everyone had slotted into their old roles by the end of the day. Including Bucky, who'd given the boys crap about being slower and lazier than he remembered, which they had returned in their own fashion, mostly by referring to his 'can opener' arm.

In the conference room with Phillips and Peggy and Stark and the relevant intelligence and analysis people, Bucky sat next to Steve doing his best to pretend he wasn't aware that everyone was watching him as closely as they had during his first days back. The meeting was more informative than productive, but it was short and it didn't seem like the pencil-pushers were up to anything too awful, so it was fine and it got Bucky past one more milestone.

It also got Bucky a plausible story to explain his faked death nine months earlier and now his return to life. The truth was never an option, it had been explained to Steve, because the public knowledge that the Nazis had been creating their own super-soldiers all along would be disastrous. That everyone already knew about the Red Skull and Abraham Erskine's indirect role in that was beside the point; Steve was the only one on our side and Johann Schmidt was the only one on their side for the same reason and the revelation that the Nazis had been creating new ones while the Americans had been stumped could not come to light. So Sergeant Barnes had simply been gravely wounded in the capture of Emil Zola and his death announced to prevent Nazi reprisals while he was too weak to defend himself. The extra-large bounty on Bucky's head hadn't been a state secret and it could be used here. Bucky, who hadn't been consulted beforehand, did not mind the obfuscation. Instead, he joked about it: "It's for the best. You get captured and worked over once by HYDRA, you're a casualty of war. You let it happen a second time, maybe it's you." But everyone knew the real reasons for his acquiescence and nobody spoke them.

The following day, the Commandos were on a plane bound for Antwerp.


	5. Chapter 5

The trek to Kerken, meant to be a gentle re-entry into the war for both Bucky and the Commandos-with-Bucky, was a little more eventful than planned because the Brits had found a caravan of Dutch Nazi collaborators about ten miles away, the lot of them trying to sneak into Germany rather than face the reprisals of their liberated and furious countrymen. It had snarled traffic -- and Steve firmly believed that even in the future with all its cars, there was no traffic like military convoy traffic. By the time they got to Kerken, they were two days behind schedule and had had half a dozen opportunities to test out Bucky's return story, which went over easily enough. Bucky was clearly extremely uncomfortable with the focus on him, however, and Steve found himself looking for ways to get them all clear of the attention that Cap and the Commandos appearing always brought and the boys, who did not generally mind being the object of minor hero worship, didn't complain at the lost opportunities.

The estate by Kerken was exactly the bust Steve's twenty-first century files had said it would be, but after wading through the British army to get there, it was also the respite he had thought it might be. They stayed two days, rummaging the place for anything interesting before heading back southeast. The departure date put them back on their admittedly loose timetable; Steve had budgeted four days because he wasn't sure what the first outing of the reunited Commandos would really be like and how much early adjustment they'd need. But they didn't really need any. Bucky was settling back in to his slot well; there were still silences that were more dark than companionable, but Steve knew he could stop worrying (as much, he'd never not worry at all) when he realized that the packet of explicit photographs of some Nazi's mistress that they had found earlier had gone missing. And by missing, Steve meant added to Dugan's collection, which wouldn't have happened without Bucky's knowledge and agreement.

Getting to Bottrop was messy, but any doubts Steve -- or anyone else -- might have had about Bucky's qualification for returning to action were silenced when they found themselves in their first firefight, which of course happened at dusk when both shadows and the encroaching darkness made it hard to see who was coming at them and from where. But Bucky moved the boys around as effortlessly as he ever had, positioning them to outflank their pursuers and turn the tables while finding himself a high spot to use his rifle. (It wasn't the same Johnson he'd carried before and he'd spent two days getting one of the base armorers to customize it for him and then sighting it in to his satisfaction, but he’d seemed content with it afterward.) They didn't realize how outnumbered they'd been until the following morning, when the regular Army unit that found them told them that there'd been about thirty attackers, judging by the bodies they'd come across.

"Ain't you glad you're back in the fight, Sergeant," a bemused corporal asked Bucky while the Commandos were taking advantage of an offer of hot chow, which was a mixed bag of oatmeal and cocoa alongside canned fruit and powdered scrambled eggs and whatever came out of the C-rations cans.

"Beats standing around cooling my heels like I was," Bucky replied easily enough as he took a sip of chicory coffee. Behind him, the other Commandos coughed and Steve smiled, more broadly after Bucky realized that by making the first joke, he'd effectively placed his time in cryostasis within the limits of acceptable mockery.

The HYDRA base at Bottrop was cleared out when they got there, as expected, but not very thoroughly. There were papers that hadn't burned completely and Monty and Jacques managed to salvage a few boxes' worth of files that had char marks but useful material inside. It was mostly scientific, but nothing to do with the super-soldier serum in any way; there were blueprints of a new variant of the HYDRA blaster rifles and a few examples, most of which were incomplete but they took everything anyway. There were also two of the blaster pistols, which were very rare in the wild because they were only issued to higher-ranking officers. Bucky was clearly considering keeping one instead of (or maybe in addition to) his issued sidearm.

"Take it if you want," Steve told him when he found Bucky holding the reconfigured Luger. "It's a smart enough piece and it can't hurt to have a backup that won't run out of ammo."

Bucky grimaced, the unhappy kind that Steve was learning to recognize as accompanying bad memories. "I know it's a smart piece," Bucky agreed with an ease that wasn't even close to real. "I've used one before."

Steve didn't ask for details. "Take it," he said instead. "And use it to remember that you're not there anymore."

Bucky gave him a look he couldn't read, but he was still holding it when Steve walked away because Gabe was calling for him and, later, when he saw Bucky trying to convince Jacques that they really didn't need to blow the place up because regular Army Intelligence was gonna be all over it like cockroaches, it was tucked into his belt loop.

They spent the evening in the sheltering embrace of the 94th ID, through which Steve organized the priority shipment of their Bottrop load back to London, before heading off in the morning for Bielefeld.

The base in Bielefeld needed digging out to get into, but not nearly as much as would be required in 1955, when the civilian construction crew had been excavating for days before realizing that there was a tunnel underneath. In April 1945, it took six men with shovels (and one on guard duty) an entire day, during which first the SSR's intel and then Steve's leadership were questioned because why the hell were they spending all day digging a hole in what was still very much enemy territory?

"This isn't you being stubborn, is it?" Bucky asked him during a late lunch break, dragging him off a little so that none of the boys would hear him questioning Steve's orders. "We already hit the dry hole in Kerken..."

Steve shook his head. "We've got first-person testimony that this place exists and that the way to get into it is at these coordinates," he promised. "It was hard to find before the mudslide, but it's there."

Bucky cocked an eyebrow to express just what he thought of the intel the SSR had gotten from some Nazi prisoner, but he made sure the grumbling didn't get too loud when they resumed digging.

When Dum Dum's shovel hit metal, however, the complaints stopped. It took them another hour to dig the door out and then give it enough space to open, but that was only the beginning of the work because the door was heavy and damaged and there was enough silt and whatever else to make opening it impossible without digging out even further to get some space to stand with a crowbar.

"Any way you can pry it open with your dainty fingertips, Sergeant?" Gabe asked, wiggling his fingers. He was being silly and serious at the same time and Bucky looked like he might seriously be considering it.

"Still gonna need to dig out a space next to the door," he finally answered. "We're not going to be able to stand on it and pull it open no matter what we use."

Jacques made one of those particularly French noises of skepticism.

Steve and Bucky exchanged a look because they had both known that this would be coming.

"We can't risk causing an avalanche if we blow the door to Berlin," Steve finally said. "Unless you want to spend another day digging it out again."

Jacques looked almost insulted. "I am capable of great finesse," he sniffed. "Also, Stark gave me more liquid taper."

Figuring they were going to have to dig for another few hours no matter what, either to make a place to stand to get leverage or after an explosion, Steve gave up and let Jacques do his thing, which despite the ribbing and the penchant for fireballs, he really was quite good at, _especially_ the finesse jobs, because he'd been a saboteur before he'd been a soldier.

They watched Monty, under close direction, and Jacques first fill the crevices around the door with the liquid taper and then squish down a ring of plastic explosive that Jacques had rolled out into ropes the size of fat spaghetti. Jacques laid in the detonator and they all stood back for the fire in the hole.

Steve knew it had worked before the smoke and the shower of dirt cleared because of the smell.

"Ah, crap," Dugan grumbled. "Dead people."

“This is why nobody knows anyone who has ever been to Bielefeld,” Gabe muttered as the foul air surrounded them. “You’re not gonna make us go in there, sir... of course you are.”

Steve grimaced apologetically. Next to him, Bucky sighed deeply and walked over to his pack and dug out the jar of Vick’s Vapor Rub he carried. They didn’t use the stuff often in the field because the smell carried and could give them away – they’d used it to lay a false trail a couple of times – but it was useful for things like toe fungus and other hazards of soldiering and Bucky had carried a small jar of it since he’d been a private.

With their nostrils dabbed and flashlights on, Steve led Gabe, Dugan, and Monty down into the tunnel, which went straight for a couple hundred yards until they hit a doorway, which was open. There’d been a pair of corpses right near the entrance, which was why the smell had been so bad, but then nothing. They went through the doorway and found a metal staircase, which led to a large open room the size of a football field with work stations and heavy equipment. According to the history books Steve had read in the future, the base had been a weapons development plant and this floor was where the prototypes had been built and tested. It was empty, but didn’t look abandoned – one month wasn’t enough to accumulate more than a thin layer of dust – and would require them to take a much longer look once they’d fully cleared the facility. For the time being, they made a quick tour and Steve agreed with Gabe that Jim should brought down to see what he could see.

They found another stairwell and went up and, even with the menthol destroying their sense of smell, they could tell that this was where the corpses would be. On the plans, this floor should have been partially above ground, a semi-submerged level with windows near the ceilings that would be barely above ground from the outside. But there was no fresh air and no natural light. Instead, they found the windows barred with steel girders and then covered from the outside with debris, presumably from one of the bombings that had rocked the city.

This floor had been offices and the cafeteria and had carpeting and wood desks and ceiling lights as well as floor and desk lamps. Monty tried a few, but none of them worked. The first room they came upon was a kind of library, the walls covered in books, technical manuals and scholarly journals and reference materials along with tables and then club chairs to sit in and read. The second room was a lounge with a fridge and sink and hotplate; Dugan checked the fridge and found it empty. The third was a restroom. The fourth was an office set up like Steve had always imagined his would be one day – drafting tables, art supplies, walls covered in projects. But instead of portraiture or advertising copy, it was blueprints of various HYDRA vehicles – their tanks, their personnel carrier, and, on the far wall in a corner, a plane whose merest outline made him sick to his stomach because it would take off in two months from Slovenia with a payload that could wipe out the entire eastern half of the US.

“Grab these now,” Steve told Monty with what he hoped was an even voice. “Be careful with them.”

All four of them ended up stripping the walls and handing the sheets to Monty, who rolled them up.

The fifth room was another office identical to the one previous, except the blueprints on the walls here were munitions, including a couple of clearly second-hand mock-ups of RAF bombs.

“Isn’t that what they dropped on this city?” Monty asked, gesturing to the image of the Tallboy. Lakenheath had been full of talk of what was getting bombed and what was getting used, a kind of fashion gossip for what the well-dressed B-17 and Avro Lancaster were wearing. Monty was always on the best terms with the pilots; he could fly a prop plane, although he hadn’t enlisted as a pilot, and liked them more than fast cars, if less than fast women. “It would be ironic if the designers died trying to reverse engineer their murder weapon’s technology. Apt, but ironic.”

The sixth room was a storage closet.

The seventh was the makeshift morgue and that’s where all four of them nearly lost their lunches because the bodies were unshriven, piled high, and badly decomposed. There was no easy way to tell how many there were, although Steve would guess at least twenty. There was a single woman’s brown pump near the door, away from the bodies. Dugan pulled the door closed and took a walk down the hallway to clear his mind of what they’d just seen.

“I guess the two by the tunnel were the last ones,” Gabe said, disgust still on his face as they went toward where Dugan was waiting. “Waiting for rescue.”

“If they were other than who they were, I’d feel bad for them,” Monty said as they started back down the stairs. “To be trapped with the dead, waiting to join them. But these bastards deserve no pity.”

They went all the way back outside, blinking at the bright sunlight, which wasn’t all that bright anymore in the last of the afternoon. Steve gave a short report to Bucky, Jim, and Jacques, suggesting that they take their own turn through, see if anything struck them.

“But first we need to call in and see if we can’t some help securing the place and then packing up the fun stuff,” Steve said. “Because if we have to ask anyone from the Ninth Army, it’s all going to go to MIS and our people aren’t going to see a thing until 1960.”

Jim cranked up Veronica and Steve had a necessarily elliptical conversation with whoever was manning the radio back in Antwerp, who patched them through to London and then it was actually Stark on the line. Howard sounded cranky for the interruption until Steve explained that there were items of great personal interest to him, at which point he offered to fly to Bielefeld himself.

“I’d settle for _a_ plane,” Steve replied. “I don’t think anyone’s letting you come visit while there are still active anti-aircraft batteries around.”

Howard promised to have an answer one way or the other at the next check-in.

“Tag, you’re it,” Steve told Bucky as he gave the headset back to Jim, who started breaking Veronica back down.

Steve dug out his canteen after Bucky, Jim, and Jacques headed below, rinsing and spitting before taking a drink. He thought they might get a plane, but it probably wouldn’t be in Bielefeld because there was one airfield that hadn’t been bombed to shreds and the RAF and USAAF were both using it heavily.

About a half-hour later, Jacques appeared by the tunnel entrance. “Sergeant Barnes would like to know how close we can back up the truck to here.”

Steve exchanged a look with Dugan. “It’s pretty rough going, but we can get it here if we have to.” The tunnel entrance was in a copse of trees, but the same mudslide that had buried the entrance had also leveled the trees. They might have to push a few things out of the way. “How much is he planning on carrying up for Morita?”

Presumably, that’s why Bucky was asking – Jim had found something he wanted right away.

“It’s not for Jim,” Jacques explained with a frown, then paused before continuing. “He saw something he remembered. And it’s heavy.”

Steve nodded, accepting that Bucky wasn’t going to say more right now. “We’ll get the truck.”

He went with Gabe, leaving Monty to guard the tunnel entrance and Dugan to follow Jacques and see if he could help with the lifting. Gabe drove the truck slowly and Steve walked ahead of it looking for obstructions that could damage the vehicle’s undercarriage. He had to move a tree a few feet – not an easy thing – because it was at the wrong angle for the truck to push it out of the way and they had to drive around a few upturned stumps and divots the size of phone booths, but they got back to the site and turned the truck around. By the time they did, Jim was sitting on a pile of crates looking happy as a clam while Bucky was standing next to him with what looked like a small arc reactor because it _was_ a small arc reactor. Or, at least, the prototype of one that Howard Stark would eventually turn into the giant one that, sixty-five years from now, Tony would then miniaturize and stick in his chest.

“What’s _that_?” Gabe asked as he exited the cab. “Looks like a carnival toy.”

Steve hadn’t known that Howard had found his arc reactor at Bielefeld. There’d been no mention of it in the history books or, for that matter, in the SHIELD files that he’d read. He never would have come here if he’d known. He’d chosen this site because it had the schematics, especially for the plane, and because the munitions prototypes would save lives as Allied troops – and various civilian police forces – would be faced with plenty of unexploded ordnance that they otherwise had no idea how to defuse.

He was tempted to say that they couldn’t take it, to try to destroy it somehow, but that would probably do more damage – possibly far more literally than anything that might happen to the timeline. It was not essential to Howard’s future work, at least as Steve had understood it. Howard had been playing with HYDRA’s tesseract-fueled technology since Steve had first brought it back in 1943 and, in Tony’s telling of the story, this piece only helped him figure out how to scale it up without everything exploding.

“It’s a battery,” Bucky replied. He didn’t look too upset at having found something he remembered from his time under HYDRA control, but that might have been because that initial reaction had happened in the dark with only Jim and Jacques to possibly see it. “It’s made of the same stuff as the blue energy weapons.”

Gabe coughed out a laugh. “Yeah, best not tell Mister Stark that over the radio, he’ll flap his arms and fly here himself without a plane.”

They spent the rest of the daylight hours packing the truck so tightly that they were losing ground clearance on the axles. The arc reactor had to be placed specially because it was impossibly heavy for its size – Steve would have thought it should have been lighter considering the tesseract itself was only a thin shell containing weightless energy. He could tell that it required more than just serum-strength to lift it before he tried it himself – the gears in Bucky’s prosthetic elbow were making grinding noises as he lifted it up. Once they had taken and stored all that they could conceivably carry off, they camouflaged the hole, although Steve honestly didn't think anyone would be by before the SSR's people turned up, probably tomorrow if Howard were truly motivated.

There was a plane coming in to Bielefeld for them because Howard apparently was truly motivated, but because the airfield was so overused, they ended up waiting two hours, which was long enough for the plane to hit bingo fuel and need emergency priority landing. Unsurprisingly, Howard was waiting with trucks and men when they landed in Merry Old, and tried to pin Steve and then Bucky down with questions before Steve managed to get them free with a promise to reveal all at the debrief tomorrow.

The following morning, Steve and Bucky turned up at Phillips's office in the SSR's main underground bunker in London -- Bucky had assured him that the others hadn't gotten into too much trouble ("Define 'not too much?'" "Less than you, more than me?") after their first night of liberty in the city in at least six months -- with the intention of giving the formal debriefing of their German adventures, but things got off-track quickly.

"Škrlatica."

Steve looked sharply over at Bucky, who was sitting next to him. Bucky was looking at the map behind Peggy on the far wall, the map of Europe with the likeliest locations of the remaining HYDRA bases on them. Steve had helped put the first half-dozen pins in that map when he'd rescued the 107th in 1943 and it had grown more cluttered since, color-coded pins denoting bases they'd heard of or visited or destroyed. There was a pin at Škrlatica, but it was blue for not having been confirmed as legitimate yet. The first time around, confirmation had come in late May, when the SSR had compiled enough evidence to elucidate a confirmation from Zola of how important Škrlatica really was and how likely it was that Schmidt was there when the rest of the Reich had essentially crumbled into nothing. But that first time around hadn't had Bucky to possibly put things in motion a few weeks early.

"Gesundheit?" Roberts, the supervisor of the analysts offered up, bemused. Roberts's appointment to the SSR had been some kind of politics move, a compromise to allow the creation of yet another intelligence and direct action agency when the old ones and the Pentagon were still throwing fits about the OSS. He was ill-fitted to the work, lacking any subtlety of thought, but he was a good personnel manager and a decent man and everyone made do because any replacement would have been worse. He’d head up SHIELD’s human resources division after the war.

Peggy, on the other hand, realized exactly what Bucky had done. "Do you have something to add to that, Sergeant?"

At the head of the table, Phillips stopped signing the wad of papers his aide had handed to him for the purpose, pen frozen an inch off the top page.

"It's a base, ma'am," Bucky answered, eyes still on the map. He did that still, not making eye contact with anyone if he had to talk about his time under HYDRA's control. Peggy would have been sharp about it with someone else -- she'd had quite enough of the subtle disrespect that that action could mean. But she knew Bucky's tendency, recognized it as a kind of coping mechanism, and let it be. "It was Schmidt's base of operations. Probably still is."

Peggy exchanged a look with Steve before she spoke, a silent conversation and confirmation before she pressed Bucky any further. No, Steve shook his head, he hadn't heard this from Bucky before and yes, he thought asking would be useful. Bucky remembered almost everything from those eight months, especially the killing he'd done and the pain he'd endured, but there were still gaps and shining a light on those gaps tended to send him into a tailspin. But Bucky didn't seem to be on the precipice of one of those memory holes now.

"Were you taken there?" Peggy asked carefully. "Or was it spoken about in your presence?"

Normally, Bucky would bristle at being handled delicately for his POW experiences, but not here. Here he didn't even notice the way Peggy was treating his experiences as passive.

"I was taken there, ma'am," Bucky answered, then paused, biting his lower lip before continuing. "They wanted to show me off. Progress update. Schmidt had started the work on me, then left the others to do the routine parts. They wanted to show him the finished product."

Peggy then led Bucky slowly through what he remembered of the visit, how he got there, what he saw and did while there, how long he stayed. Bucky kept his eyes on the map as he answered in a flat voice. The place was massive, bigger than any other base he'd seen in HYDRA captivity including his first one, and he didn't know if there was ground access because they'd come in by air -- the base had a hangar and a fleet of planes. He saw a few levels as he was led to Schmidt's labs for a physical exam that Peggy deftly skirted around without making it appear she was doing so because it would have been indistinguishable from describing a rape. But she winced as she failed to avoid Bucky explaining how he'd seen a munitions stockpile including bombs shaped like planes -- which Steve immediately recognized the importance of -- because he'd been taken to that level to prove his conditioning's effectiveness by barehandedly murdering three prisoners in a makeshift ring surrounded by cheering HYDRA personnel.

"Then I was rinsed off and put in the stasis tank for the first time," Bucky finished. His eyes had moved from the map to his hands curled on the table and it took most of Steve's fortitude to not reach out, to not offer comfort because as much as Bucky clearly needed it, he wouldn't want it. "They took me out again because they'd wanted to see if it would work, but I just stayed in the lab for another exam and then they put me back in. I don't know how long it was until they took me out again, but we were back in Poland."

Steve had already known from the future that the cryostasis chamber had originally been developed for and by Schmidt, a kind of escape pod into the future should it prove necessary. The first human subjects had died during testing and Bucky had been used as the next guinea pig to see if the serum would make it survivable. Once that had proven to be the case, the cryo chamber had become Bucky's prison because it made keeping him easier and, much later, it would preserve him as young and fresh for the next kill.

Peggy circled back to more benign -- if such a thing could be said about any of this -- parts of Bucky's reportage for follow-up questions that might not have been strictly necessary but at least drew attention back to the base and did not further require Bucky to relive his horrors.

And then with the impeccable/awful Stark timing that Steve, after having watched Tony for years, still hadn't decided was nurture or nature, Howard burst into the room full of energy and delight.

"Sergeant Barnes, you have repaid our efforts to retrieve you with one grand gesture," he announced jubilantly. Then, as if in a cartoon, he realized what he'd walked in on and, metaphorically, what he'd stepped into.

"Sit down, Mister Stark," Phillips said. "You're late."

Chastened for reasons he did not yet know, Howard took his seat next to Phillips and across from Peggy. "I apologize, Colonel. I was caught up in a discovery that can probably wait. What have I missed?"

"Sergeant Barnes knows where Johann Schmidt is hiding," Peggy told him. Her tone was mild, but Steve could hear the archness and, he was sure, Howard would, too. Howard was always late to meetings that weren't about things he was interested in and, since many of those things happened to be items that Peggy was very interested in (or at least involved in), there was occasional friction.

"Oh."

"Oh, indeed," Peggy agreed and Howard had the good grace to wince.

The discussions about Škrlatica were brief, mostly because the analysts and field agents would have to do work to update the file as the blue pin of "reported base" was replaced with a purple one for a confirmed site. Once the assignments were given out -- none to the Commandos, for reasons that had nothing to do with Bucky -- the topic of conversation moved on to what had originally been on the agenda: what had been found in Germany and the possible importance of Bielefeld.

When it came time to explain the now-legendarily heavy object Bucky had insisted the Commandos bring back, Howard's glee overcame his shame and he put on a show. Nobody, least of all Bucky, minded too much.

It was afternoon by the time they finished and while everyone else started talking about lunch and where to find it, Steve elbowed Bucky in the bicep. "Feel like a run?"

Bucky looked at him like he was debating whether Steve was cosseting him or not, so Steve gave him a challenging expression back and so Bucky nodded. "Sure."

They changed into gear -- Phillips was pretty firm on service uniforms while in garrison, which counted as all of London -- and took off, spending two-plus hours getting a personal update on what the last year had done to Hampstead Heath. Bucky, Steve hoped, was taking the time to clear his head and return to the present. He, on the other hand, was thinking about his return to the future.

The countdown clock in his head for when he'd go down in Schmidt's plane had been set by history and he'd lived this returned life with it always on his mind and dictating his every action. He hated it, mostly, especially as he'd gotten re-acclimated to this time and felt less like a stranger in his own skin, but he'd never seriously given thought to doing anything about it. With the obvious exceptions of rescuing Bucky and acting on his feelings for Peggy, he'd done what he could to keep his ripples on the timeline as tiny as possible. But Captain America living to the end of the war was not a tiny ripple, it was a tsunami.

"I know why I'm a moody sonofabitch," Bucky caught up to him as they rounded one of the banks of semi-legal allotments that had sprouted up over the years. The Americans ate well in England on their own bases and if they could pay the prices at the better establishments, but for the average citizen, it was ration books and whatever they could find through their own industry. "But what's your excuse?"

Dugan hadn't been wrong about Bucky flourishing when he was required to look past his own pain and tend to others, but, as always, there were others and then there was Steve. He knew that Bucky had been cataloging the differences between the Steve who had helplessly watched him fall from the train and the one who had rescued him from Poland, that he was trying to figure out how eight months explained those differences and then failing because there was no explanation. Not without the truth, and as much as it truly hurt Steve to hold that back from him, he couldn't do otherwise. It would hurt the timeline and, more importantly to Steve, it would destroy Bucky.

(He should feel worse than he did about how easy it was to lie to Bucky; he'd gotten the practice in between when Bucky had shipped out with the 107th and when they'd found each other in Europe. A long string of fictional letters about a New York he hadn't seen in months and a life he no longer lived. Bucky had forgiven him, mostly because his own letters home had been so heavily redacted that the censors had rarely needed to black out a word.)

"What did you want to do after the war?" Steve asked instead of answering Bucky's question. "At the beginning, before everything."

Bucky frowned at him, sensing that this wasn't a complete change of topic.

"Figured I'd come home, mooch off you for a while until I got a job at the docks or in another restaurant," Bucky answered with a careless shrug. It was a dream dreamed so long ago it wasn't even consequential. "I was good at the waitering, woulda made captain and those fellas can really rake it in at the right places. Find a girl eventually, settle down, make a few little Barneses..." he trailed off. None of that mattered now, none of that was possible now, at least as far as Bucky thought. It was still what Steve wanted for him, especially if he wasn't going to be there for Bucky to rely on, mooching or otherwise. "But I got as much chance at getting my section back at Toffenetti's as you got doing ad copy for _Life_ magazine... that's not what's bugging you, is it?"

Steve waited until they could run abreast again -- they had to go single file through the trees at this point -- before answering. "Maybe, kinda. Not that exactly..."

Bucky leaned over and bumped his shoulder into Steve's without breaking stride. "They're gonna try to keep you, but you don't have to stay if you don't want to," he said. "You want to go home and draw for a living, you want to stay in London as Agent Carter's kept man, you do it and let them try to make you do anything else. You signed the same ‘duration plus six months’ contract as everyone else. And you certainly didn't get any easier to budge when you got big."

Steve smiled, but couldn't hold it. "I don't know what I want to do," he admitted, thinking back to how Sam kept encouraging him to figure out the answer to that question. "I want all that, I do, and it blows my mind that they're even possibilities, you can't imagine. But... the minute I take off this uniform, the minute I decide that it's 'me time,' there's going to be someone I could have saved. And that number's only going to get bigger and I don't know if I'll be able to live with that, live with myself, if I've got everything I want when I know someone else is losing their everything and I could have prevented it."

Which was as close to the truth as he could get, at least in spirit. If he ever said 'to hell with this, I want to stay here and now,' what would he do to the future? What would he do to his friends, his country, his _world_ now that he knew that there were aliens out there waiting to conquer Earth?

Bucky sighed and chuckled mirthlessly. "At least that much of you hasn't changed a whit. You aren't supposed to do this until you die, Steve. And I'll fight anyone who tells you different."

But he was. At least that was how history knew it.

"Don't need you to fight my battles for me anymore," he said, since Bucky was waiting for some kind of response. "And I don't want to fight you again. I don't think I could stand it."

Bucky snorted as jumped over a hole in the ground. "We haven't fought-fought since we were ten. Pretty sure we got it out of our systems by now."

Bucky ran ahead then and didn't see the pain on Steve's face from remembering how untrue that was.

It took less than a week – and one visit to Zola – for Phillips and the other SSR thinkers to decide that Škrlatica was the last bastion of HYDRA and the most probable location of Johann Schmidt. It would take a few weeks to plan the mission to Slovenia, mostly to acquire photo surveillance and figure out how accessible the base was by ground transport (it was, but there were heavy gun emplacements that would have to be taken out before the single road could be used), but also because the SSR would need to borrow an army battalion or two, preferably one used to alpine work. Which in turn meant the 10th Mountain Division, fortunately nearby doing duty in Italy. Partially for his own peace of mind, Steve suggested to Peggy that they go ahead and ask for all or some of the 87th Infantry Regiment; the last time, Phillips had gone to the commanding general of the 10th Mountain and just asked for anyone, which had set off a pass-the-buck competition that had made the SSR a tense place to work because it was impossible to plan an assault on a mountain fortress when you didn’t know who was leading the charge. The First Battalion of the 87th had wound up with the job and done it well.

Steve was not going to be around to see his suggestion implemented; he was being sent to Paris for four days of PR business, photo ops and glad-handing dignitaries and more sincere handshaking of actual troops. The Commandos weren’t originally supposed to go, even though Jacques was the obvious person to be right next to Steve in the photographs, but they made enough of a nuisance of themselves that Peggy accused Bucky of letting them act out intentionally so that they could go.

“You think I want to spend half a week smiling for the cameras?” Bucky asked her, incredulous. Bucky hadn’t done any press since his return was made public, despite significant pressure from the Army to at least do an interview with _Stars and Stripes_ even if he was going to turn down _Life_ and _The Saturday Evening Post_ as well as the New York papers, always eager to keep up with the most famous of their traveling sons.

“I think you’ll do a lot you wouldn’t otherwise do so that Jacques Dernier can see his family,” Peggy replied, not looking up from where she was neatly slicing a dozen sheets of map paper with the guillotine-like cutter.

Jacques had a wife and daughter he had seen maybe a dozen times since 1940; Steve had always been willing to fit a detour in to their plans when time allowed, but it had rarely been that simple. Madame Dernier was a Resistance fighter in her own right – Jacques liked to brag that he’d learned his bomb-making skills from her – and the Vichy government had had a bounty on her head. Their daughter, Marianne, had originally traveled with her mother, but once she’d gotten too big to carry, she’d been secreted with various relatives in Aude. Jacques had last seen Marianne in October, when Steve had given him permission to leave the Commandos for a few days after he’d gotten word through the Resistance grapevine of where she was going to be. But with France reclaiming her sovereignty and her territory, Jacques had a decent chance of getting word to, if not actual contact with, his family if he was on his native soil for a few days.

“All due respect, Agent Carter, I think you’d do just the same,” Bucky retorted.

Peggy looked up in challenge, then shrugged because it was true. Peggy was a closet romantic, if not quite the type who secreted copies of ladies magazines and romance novels in her rucksacks. “I will warn you now, Sergeant, that if there are any reports from any military policemen about misbehavior, you _will_ be talking to Mister Murrow at length and for the record.”

Steve might’ve looked a little too amused after Peggy left them because Bucky was frowning at him. “I knew this day was gonna come. You find a gal and all of a sudden, I’m sold down the river.”

Steve patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Buck, you’ll always be my second-best girl.”

There might have been a chase through SSR headquarters that was as responsible, if not more, for why the Commandos went to France than anything Peggy had originally mentioned.

Before they left, however, Howard gave Bucky a pair of silicone covers for his hand, different styles he had worked out. They were flesh-toned, if not quite the same color as Bucky’s skin, and went halfway up the forearm with a cutout for the hose that attached the parts above and below the elbow joint. They had fingernails painted on and wouldn’t pass for real up close, but they might be enough to fool a camera. It was an open secret that Sergeant Barnes had lost part of his arm – he’d been seen by too many soldiers by now – but, like FDR’s wheelchair, it had been kept out of all official mentions of Bucky’s return. (The actual nature of his injuries had remained vague; there were so many war wounded by this point that nobody’s curiosity was that unquenchable.)

“If you have to answer a question about the arm,” Howard warned Bucky as he tested the fit of both samples. One had a bit more texture to the fingertips than the other, which Bucky seemed transfixed by. “Tell them that I built it.”

Steve rather thought that an obvious solution; it was too high-tech, too futuristic, for anyone else (on the Allied side) to have done it. They just had to hope that nobody remembered that there were folks on the other side who could do it, too.

Paris was fine, cleaned up since they’d last been there in December and much more lovely for spring having sprung. Steve posed for dozens of photos, signed hundreds of autographs, and shook thousands of hands; he had honestly forgotten how exhausting the promotional stuff was and he looked forward to the point each evening when he could leave whatever soiree he was at – there was always one more party to go to – and go back to the hotel and crash. The Commandos – except for Jacques, who’d had word waiting for him when they arrived that his family was already in town – came along to as many events as Steve could manage, occasionally turning them into party crashers and daring the hosts to deal with it. The Commandos were a mixed bag in polite society. Dum Dum turned into a wallflower, nursing a large glass of whiskey with his discomfort visible to all. Jim would either find someone to talk electronics with or go hang out with Dugan rather than deal with the patronizing or insulting comments about his being Japanese and being asked if his family was interned (yes) or if he had family fighting for the Emperor (probably, but nobody he’d ever met). Monty had the most experience, but could never quite hide his disdain. Gabe, on the other hand, had fun; he was a people person, well-read and worldly and eager to meet others who could keep up with him intellectually and just as determined to prove that his skin color did not make any of that remarkable. Bucky had used to be charming and outgoing, invariably surrounded by people (mostly women, but not all), and deeply amused to be a Brooklyn boy mixing with people who’d never have given him the time of day back home. Now, he was still charming and would have been surrounded by people if he’d allowed it, but instead he made sure to slip away before the crowd around him got too thick, checking in with teammates more than was necessary and spending more time by Steve’s side than he ever had before.

They returned to London, which looked sullen and gray after seeing Paris’s bloom, and Bucky presented himself to Peggy with the announcement that the Commandos were reporting for duty, “intact and innocent.”

Peggy might’ve snorted tea out her nose.

It was going to take a few days for useful mission planning to begin – the First Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment had been secured, but their command and mission planners were still in transit to London. Steve could have sat around doing background reading, it would have just made him and the Commandos convenient targets for inane tasks and unimportant questions framed as urgent matters. Instead, before one of the actually useful meetings, he and Bucky went down to the motor pool and secured the use of a truck for the weekend, then he told Phillips that he was taking the Commandos up to Scotland for training.

“You can’t train locally?”

“Mountaineering, sir,” Steve explained helpfully. “It’s colder up there and I’ve seen what passes for hills around here.”

After half a week of fetes and fine French food, some exercise would do everyone good. Naturally, there was a lot of griping on the way up about how the two super-soldiers were in charge of the trip considering that neither of them needed to watch their waistlines.

“Keep up the griping and the two super-soldiers are going to make sure nobody has the breath to complain on the way back down,” Steve warned. It shut everyone up for a while.

It was a good training weekend. Steve and Bucky had plotted out courses that worked everyone extremely hard, especially since they were training with full gear (weightwise; their rucks were full of rocks and not their actual gear), but Steve also let them sleep late in the mornings and, Sunday night, they stopped at a pub before heading back south of Hadrian’s Wall. The ride home was thus accompanied by loud, off-key singing in the rear of the truck – Steve and Bucky took turns driving, since they were the only sober ones – until the boys fell asleep one by one. Up front in the truck’s cab, Steve and Bucky rode in companionable silence save for the caterwauling from the rear. By the time they were passing Leeds, the silence was real and it felt much deeper for driving down a highway that might as well have been on the moon for the isolation and darkness.

“How long did it take you to get used to it?” Bucky asked and Steve might’ve been falling asleep in on the passenger side because he blinked awake at the words, which didn’t make sense right away.

“To what?”

“The new you,” Bucky answered, eyes not leaving the road. They were allowed to use the headlights now, but the road itself still wasn’t lit. Or maybe Bucky was just avoiding looking at him.

“Sometimes I wonder if I ever did,” Steve admitted. He’d been half-expecting this conversation since Bucky had gotten back, but it hadn’t come and he’d stopped waiting for it, not that he had any real answers. “I learned most of the physical stuff pretty quickly – higher eye line, new strength, more energy – out of simple self-preservation and because they were testing me, but I was on my own for the rest, all the more with Doctor Erskine gone. I couldn’t draw worth a damn for a few months because my hands were so different and I think that scared me more than anything, to have traded the one thing I had been good at for everything else. Especially when everything else turned out to be being a chorus girl.

“I recognize myself in the mirror now, but in my head, I’m still five-four and when I run in my dreams, I wheeze.”

Bucky said nothing in response and the only sound was the wheels over the road.

“I don’t think I remember who I used to be,” Bucky finally said after a few minutes had passed. “I know I look a lot like that guy, but I feel like I’m wearing someone else’s skin as well as someone else’s arm.”

Steve chuffed out a mirthless laugh because _this_ , this he understood better than Bucky could ever appreciate. This had been his life for the last six months, pretending to be someone he wasn’t anymore.

“You haven’t been back very long,” he pointed out. “And everyone has been acting like nothing’s changed, but all it does is make it worse because everything _has_ changed and you’re never sure if you want someone to call you on it or if you want nobody to notice. But I promise you, the longer you’re here, the more the old you and the new you will meet in the middle. And you’ll stop feeling like what you once thought of as home, being among the people who care about you, is such a foreign country.”

He looked over at Bucky, who spared him a considering look back before returning his eyes to the road but said nothing until he pulled over south of Sheffield and told Steve it was his turn to drive.

Monday morning at SSR headquarters was unusually chaotic; there had been an intercepted radio conversation about a package that would be leaving Villach, Austria and headed for Škrlatica. The message had originally been considered to be about something else – the transport of treasures stolen by the Nazis – but once the SSR had gotten their hands on it, they had realized what was going on.

“It’s not gold or paintings on their way to Argentina,” Grossman, the lead HYDRA analyst told them with barely suppressed excitement. “It’s materiel for Schmidt. He’s retrenching.”

The package itself would be hard to intercept – Grossman didn’t think it was going to be traveling by road, not with the most direct path being under the full control of the US Army, and they could watch the skies, but a plane could get through, especially at night. Steve understood all this, but still asked to be tasked with the mission instead of sitting around for the next few weeks doing nothing but training and sitting in meetings and watching the days of his countdown drop to zero before the clock reset in the future.

His request was denied, but the mission to Škrlatica was about to get much bigger and happen much quicker than Phillips had originally planned. It would still be about three weeks earlier than it had been last time for Steve and he wondered how that would affect things, if Schmidt’s plane could still be loaded and sent on its deadly journey, and what happened if it couldn’t.

He wished there were someone he could ask about how crazy he was for worrying that he wouldn’t be able to go on a suicide mission. But he was pretty sure that part, at least, would go as planned. Schmidt had been rushed into action the first time, too, and Steve knew from Bucky that the bombs for the plane were already there. He wasn’t relieved about that per se, but he accepted that this was something he would have to do, payment for getting what he wanted most during this return to his native era – he saved Bucky from becoming the Winter Soldier and he got time with Peggy and he’d always known that those gifts were not without cost. He didn’t have to like it and he wasn’t looking forward to it, but he wouldn’t fight his fate.

Nonetheless, he found his restlessness making it hard to appreciate his last days with the people he loved and he was angry at himself for wasting these increasingly precious moments. He was snappish and sharp, even (especially) with people who had done nothing but their jobs, which often involved taking him away from Peggy or the Commandos. He apologized, always, but couldn’t seem to keep it from happening. Bucky intervened a couple of times, shooting him ‘what the hell is with you?’ looks while he charmed the innocent victim back into a good mood and dragging Steve off for runs that took them into Buckinghamshire just so he’d lose the jangling in his veins for a little while. But nothing helped. He felt like a kid throwing a tantrum because he had to leave the playground to go home. This is where he was happy and he wanted to stay, but Father Time said no.

“I don’t know what’s with you, Captain, but get it straightened out,” Phillips barked at him after a too-long planning meeting during which he had been short and surly and then insufficiently remorseful when called on it. “Carter’s the only one allowed to act like she’s on the rag and she doesn’t use the privilege. You don’t have the parts, so you don’t have the excuse.”

Peggy had seen him act out, but she’d said nothing so far and it was only when it was too late that he realized why. They’d had an evening to themselves, a rare treat made possible by a power outage limiting activities to what was possible by oil lamp and then Bucky, who’d taken the Commandos out for what was probably a girlie show but he’d said it was a movie. Peggy had taken him to a quiet restaurant in Brixton that had somehow survived all of the destruction and then back to the flat she was staying in, a grand place belonging to friends of her parents who were grateful to have someone they trusted keeping an eye on it while they rode out the war in Shropshire.

“What’s going on in that head of yours?” Peggy asked, combing her fingers through his hair as they lay entwined. He leaned into the touch like he was trying to memorize it, but her fingers stilled and she tugged his hair so that he’d have to pull back and look up at her. “You’ve been uneasy for weeks.”

He shook his head gently so not to dislodge her fingers. “It’s nothing,” he assured, giving her a smile and kissing her jaw. “Just antsy, I guess. It’s Schmidt, who started all of this, and it’s probably the last big push between us and the other side – unless I get sent to the Pacific theater...”

Peggy did take her hand away, using it to push Steve away and on to his back so she could sit up and look down at him, anger on her face. “Please don’t lie to me, Steve. I would respect your wish not to talk about whatever it is, but I would hope you’d respect _me_ enough not to lie. Not at all, I should hope, but certainly not here.”

He thought about denying it, but squashed the urge. “I’m sorry,” he said, meeting her angry gaze and holding it, letting her see whatever she wanted to look for. She did look and whatever she saw made her sigh sadly and settle back down in the bed facing him, although not back into his arms.

“You’re scaring me,” she said softly, reaching out to touch his face. He caught her hand before she pulled it away and she let him hold it. “I fear for you every time you go out, I always have. And yet I’ve always been comforted by your own confidence, your own surety that you’d come home and bring everyone with you. Which you have, even if it took so long to bring Bucky back. But here we are, at the summit of the mountain we’ve been climbing together for two years, and you... You are acting like you know that you aren’t coming home, that something is going to happen and you won’t survive it. And that terrifies me.”

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, gladdened and saddened both that she could read him so well. He’d never meant to force her to share this burden with him.

“I don’t want you to be afraid,” he said, bringing her hand to his lips and kissing her palm. “Not for me. Not for yourself. We have nothing to fear from the future. It’s going to be amazing and you are still going to have my heart to do with what you will long after you run out of ideas.”

It wasn’t a denial and he didn’t think Peggy had missed that, but it was as close as he could get to promising her that he wasn’t running off to get killed without lying by commission. Everything he’d said was true and he knew she could tell that he believed it. It was going to be cold comfort afterward, but he also knew that she would grieve and then heal, find a new love and be happy, and he was grateful for that. It was one less reason to hurt.

“I don’t think I’ll run out of ideas for a good long while,” Peggy said, smiling past the tears that had been sneaking up on them both. She tugged on the hand he was still holding, bringing him with it so that he was leaning over her. “I’ve got an excellent one right now, in fact.”

The two weeks leading up to their departure from London (the assault on Škrlatica would not happen for another week after) were intense and he gratefully found himself too busy to be nervous or sad or regretful, at least during the day. He was in meetings that were pure strategy sessions, he was in the Commandos’ room doing his own mission planning, he was negotiating supplies with the SSR quartermasters and occasionally with Howard, he was training with the boys (in bombed-out locales in London, where Jacques could hardly make things worse), he was doing what he could to keep in the loop of the larger mission so that he could make sure it went off as it had before. He wasn’t surprised to see most of the same suggestions made at the same points as last time, but he wasn’t above shifting his support this time around to the plan that didn’t involve him playing bait for Schmidt. One less punch to the stomach wouldn’t change history. It would be a more straightforward assault this time, which the guys from the 1-87th were more than okay with because they were more involved.

Even though he and the Commandos were only a small part of a large force, he was busy because Captain America was expected to be involved in all aspects of the planning. It was occasionally frustrating to have eyes look to him for approval when his opinion ultimately didn’t matter – Phillips respected his abilities, but had never thought him more than he was – but in this case, he didn’t mind because for this one mission, he was the ultimate expert.

He also had ulterior motives for agreeing to the extra work. He got up early, he worked late, he exercised at odd hours to exhaust himself so that he could sleep for a few hours at night because the nights... the nights were hard. He felt the pull of the future in a way he hadn’t before, like it was a magnet drawing him in when he still needed to focus on the present. He couldn't turn his brain off even in his sleep. He relived memories of the twenty-first century in his dreams, which he had largely stopped doing after the first couple of months back in time, but also of how the mission to Škrlatica had gone the first time. He woke himself up screaming reliving the plane crash and the Chitauri invasion more than once, but he mostly dreamed of less traumatic events, like watching Sam soar over Manhattan in his new wings, whooping in delight over his radio before coming in for a landing and giving Tony a hug that had picked him clear off his feet. He missed the people he knew in the future, and he was a little ashamed that he hadn’t thought of them more often. But he didn’t miss the person he’d been and, in the dark of the night, he promised himself that he’d do something about it this time. He could change _that_ future, whatever it turned out to be.

If he got defrosted in 2011 again, it would be weird to meet everyone anew, for him to be such a stranger while they weren’t to him. He’d have the patience to withstand Tony’s barbs, know how to read the subtitles of Natasha’s silences, and be able to see through Fury’s BS (better, Fury still snowed him when he wanted). He’d be a time traveler, not a man out of time. He’d know how to use a smartphone, that he liked Adele’s music, that the Dodgers were in LA and that the Cardinals, still in St. Louis, would win the World Series that fall.

He’d know that Alexander Pierce was a serpent in the grass and that Fury had a very short window in which to act to clean SHIELD’s house before HYDRA burned it down.

He’d return to a future without a Winter Soldier to chase and without his regrets about never being brave enough to tell Peggy that he loved her while they still had time to be together. He wondered what Bucky would do with his life back in his own hands, what sort of old man he’d meet – if he even looked old since neither of them knew what the serum would do about that – and whether Bucky would forgive him for not explaining everything back in 1945. (Probably. Bucky ultimately forgave him everything.) He’d step out of the fog he’d stumbled around in when he wasn’t wearing the uniform and figure out how to _live_ and not merely endure. He would have an answer to Sam’s question about what made him happy ready for when he finally met Sam – if he even waited until 2014 to do so.

But first, before he could catch up on _The Simpsons_ and _House of Cards_ , he had a plane to catch.

The SSR element of the task force was shipping out in pieces, partially to avoid the detection of the spies that watched them, but also for more practical logistical reasons. The 87th Infantry Regiment was already in Italy and that's where everyone would stage before crossing into Slovenia, but Phillips needed to stay in London as long as possible so he could handle the last-minute breakdowns, including the USAAF Command's constant waffling on who would be providing air support. The Commandos, meanwhile, were flying to Rome so that Captain America could put in a couple of PR appearances to make it seem less remarkable that he was in-country when there was action elsewhere. This was another new twist from last time; last time Steve and the Commandos had gone straight to the staging area on the same plane as most of the SSR's gear. But it was harmless enough. They'd move north-east, shaking hands all the way, and jump on board the hopefully-moving mission train with three days to go.

Before they left, Steve cleaned up his quarters, organizing his papers and getting rid of anything he didn't want history to record. He didn't want the place to look like he had assumed he was never coming back, but nobody needed to know that Peggy had kept a pencil to re-draw her stockings seams (or, rather, to let him re-draw them) in the cup he kept his art and map pencils in, for instance. He tucked the death letters he'd written in the drawer with his handkerchiefs where they would be out of sight but easily found when his effects were collected. There were two, to Peggy and to Bucky, apologizing (but not really) to them both for being who he was and saying that he loved them and wished he'd had more time with them, but he was grateful for the time he'd had. He thanked them for their care of him and their love and asked that they look after each other for him and be happy for themselves.

When he closed the door behind him for the last time, it was bittersweet but also a little hopeful for being forward-looking. He'd felt like this when he'd closed his door for the last time in Brooklyn on his way to Camp Lehigh -- he'd known that it was an ending, but also that it would be a new beginning. So would this.

Their last stop in Italy before rejoining the task force was in Padua, which had been liberated by the 8th Army about six weeks earlier, not quite enough time for the delirium to die down. The Commandos were treated well by the soldiers, who were under no delusions that Captain America was around just to say hello but assumed that his destination was a bit further north than Slovenia. Steve was happy to let them continue to believe such.

This wasn't the first time the Commandos had been back in Italy since their capture, but it was the first time they had been back publicly. Their stories were well-enough known now that someone asked whether it looked better now than it had in 1943.

"Nobody's shooting at us this time," Bucky answered for everyone, earning a laugh all around. "Makes it look like home."

They'd driven north afterward, stopping in a village that had a restaurant that looked open and had a few Commonwealth soldiers sitting out front with beers and plates of fresh pasta. Not wanting to draw too much attention, they took a table inside and enjoyed what they presumed would be their last 'real' meal until they got back to London -- after this, it would be Army rations.

There was enough wine to make everyone not Steve and Bucky merry, nobody overdoing it so close to the action, and plenty to eat. It was a good time and if Steve didn't quite forget that this was very likely his last meal with these friends, he still enjoyed it without reservation. The closer they'd come to rejoining the task force, the more at peace he'd become with what awaited him. He had gotten what he'd come back in time for and this, getting to have one last good time with men he'd grown to like and then love, this was part of that, too. Closure, as Sam would put it, but closed gently and not slammed shut.

Even if the others didn't know what was ahead for him, they still appreciated the symbolism of the upcoming mission. They had come together because of Schmidt -- the Commandos had been born in those prisoner pens -- and now they were finally in a position to return the favor with interest. There was a lot of reminiscing and toasting absent companions -- the men of the 107th especially. When it was Steve's turn to give a toast, he looked around the table and smiled. "There is a long list of commanders who have thanked me personally for taking you off of their hands. I could not have fallen in with a more ridiculous crew if I'd tried. But I also couldn't have found better men if I'd tried, either. So, thank you."

When they got to their destination, Peggy, Phillips, and a mixed bag of problems and chaos awaited. Steve checked in with the SSR people and set about finding working and sleeping space for the Commandos, leaving Bucky to organize both once he’d done so because he was getting dragged into a planning session with the battalion headquarters staff of the 1-87th to go over how they were hoping to wipe out the defense batteries the air strikes couldn’t touch. They were all in defilade, of course, and too close to the one road for the aerial bombers to even think about attacking. The alpine troops had mapped out each one, however, and were going through their preferred options for dealing with each.

“Dernier’s gonna love these guys,” Bucky murmured into his ear as he slipped into the seat Steve had been keeping for him as the operations officer explained how much explosive would be used to take out one particular artillery battery.

“Everyone’s good?” Steve asked at a similar volume. He knew Bucky would’ve taken care of the boys; he was instead asking if Bucky had had any problems from anyone else while doing so.

“Everything’s squared,” Bucky assured, pulling out his little notebook and worn-down pencil so he could jot down notes. These weren’t the sort of details either of them would need to keep straight in their heads, but having them to hand couldn’t hurt. “Dugan found an old friend of his in Baker Company’s headquarters, so the two of them are catching up on what they’ve been up to since the Spanish-American War.”

When they got done with the meeting and back to the Commandos, Dugan had returned bearing oranges, Monty was eating said oranges, Gabe was reading, Jacques was squirreling away his latest acquisitions in his bag of many tricks, and Jim was fiddling with an electronic device that looked like either Tony Stark or Buck Rogers should be holding it.

"Are you supposed to be using that here?" Bucky asked Jim, sounding like he knew exactly what it was and that he didn't like Jim futzing with it. "If you blow up all our radios before we kick off, we're gonna have to pass you off as your Italian cousin Jimmy Moritoni and hide you in the hills until Phillips can be convinced not to court martial your ass."

Jim looked up guiltily. "I'm not turning it on."

"Only 'cuz we're standing here," Bucky retorted, but without heat. He turned to Steve. "It's some doo-dad Stark gave him. It's supposed to zap all of HYDRA's electrics, including their blasters, but he also said it would knock out all of ours."

Howard had been working mostly on harnessing the tesseract's energy, but he had also been trying to figure out ways to defend against it. The rifle blasts vaporized almost everything they hit, however, organic or inorganic material, so there'd been little luck at developing anything effective beyond Steve's shield and vibranium was too expensive for mass production. If this were an EMP device, maybe that would work. They were mighty helpful in 2014, but Steve didn't know his history of technology so well as to be sure when those came into creation or if this was something Howard had ginned up because he understood the concepts from the other, secret work he was doing out in Los Alamos.

"He also said that he wasn't sure it would work," Jim pointed out, looking up. "And when Stark isn't sure, I'm not sure."

Which was a fair assessment; Howard did not often express doubt about his own brilliance or its manifestations.

"Do me a favor and don't try it out until we get there?" Steve asked plaintively.

Jim put it down and reached for an orange.

The next two days were a combination of boring and frustrating and occasionally hilarious as everyone slowly got ready to move. On the third day, the first troops rolled out and, by the late afternoon, the Commandos were on the move.

Reliving the assault on Škrlatica with eyes that had seen twenty-first century warfare was an interesting experience, Steve could admit during the lulls. The priorities were the same: eliminate the entrenched defenses before moving the main offensive element in, seal off the HYDRA escape routes, fight their way through the facility until no enemy was left standing or free, leave with everyone you came with and all of the enemy's toys. But the capabilities were so different from what was available in 2014 and that made the tactics completely different as a result. The bombing runs by the planes couldn't take out half of the HYDRA defense positions because without precision munitions, they had a greater probability of taking out the one road into the base instead. Without ground radar and heat sensors and infrared optics to tell them who was where and what was waiting in the dark/behind a wall/under camouflage, any movement forward was a movement-to-contact action, which was simply walking until someone shot at you. Without body armor and ballistic eyewear or anything that could stop the blaster weapons, that was a far riskier proposition.

In 2014, Škrlatica could have been taken in a day, probably, if they'd gotten reliable satellite imagery and hadn't instead decided to bomb the place to smithereens from a distance. In 1945, it took the better part of three days. They needed the first day to clear and hold the road up, a battle that started before dawn and ended with the moon high in the sky; HYDRA's energy weapons were superior to anything in the US arsenal and there were only so many places to run from an incoming blast.

The Commandos went through the trees in the dark with Baker Company at their back; the motorcycle troops came and were stopped easily because they couldn't drive in the dark forest without headlamps -- it had been murder to send them out, but HYDRA had never really cared about their own cannon fodder.

The main gate had spotlights and heavy armor and troops to guard it, but on Steve's signal the spotlights were shot out and a crate's worth of grenades were tossed into the new darkness before anyone could move and it took only a brief -- but not casualty-free -- fight to get Jacques to the door so that he could lay in his charges.

"Fire in the hole!"

Once the doors were blown, Baker Company took charge of holding it until everyone else could get through while Steve led the Commandos toward the main building. Their objective was to secure the hangar; Steve had maneuvered himself into that mission during the early planning and Phillips had been happy to give it to him on the supposition that it would keep the Commandos away from Schmidt. Steve wasn't sure if it was out of fear that they'd kill Schmidt for what had been done to Bucky or whether it was to keep them safe from Schmidt, but he had never asked -- nor been asked if there would be any problem with Bucky possibly facing his torturer and definitely returning to a place where he'd been abused. Steve didn't know the answer and, right now, it was irrelevant because he had no intention of letting any of the Commandos come between him and Schmidt and their destiny.

The fight to get to the main building -- to the mountain itself, effectively -- was loud but not as difficult as it could have been with most of the HYDRA troops running toward Baker Company. The Commandos still had to wade through bodies, some dead before the encounter and most dead afterward and all of them picked up discarded blaster rifles to make swimming upstream easier. The only light came from internal lamps on high stanchions and the resulting shadows played havoc with both sides because it was hard to tell what was real and thus likely to shoot at you and what wasn't.

Steve remembered how to get to Schmidt's office from the front entrance, the path he'd been taken on by the guards the first time, and he knew how to get from there to the hangar, but he didn't know how to get directly to the hangar from the entrance. Neither did Bucky, whose own partial map of the complex covered different parts than Steve's did. When the two of them had been trying to come up with the best way to achieve their objective without having to go through all of HYDRA first, they'd been reluctantly forced to admit that going Steve's segmented route (he'd only told Bucky that the directions had come from a second source) would be the least likely to get them into trouble. Neither of them thought Schmidt would actually be in his office instead of in one of the command posts, although they had agreed it would make things much easier if he were.

Now they used the blasters to get through doors and past guards, across an open foyer (if an underground mountain fortress could have a foyer) and up five flights of stairs to the level where Schmidt's office would be.

"I don't think this retroactively justifies making us run up and down the steps at St. Paul's, sir," Gabe huffed as they collected themselves on the stairwell landing before opening the door and making the run to the far stairs that would lead them to the hangar. Steve had led the boys on various stair-running exercises, including co-opting the stairwells at the SSR headquarters before they'd been booted out.

"You got breath enough to complain, dontcha?" Bucky asked with a grin. Bucky, of course, was unaffected, as was Steve. The others were winded but functional, even Dum Dum, whose bulk belied his durability.

There were guards on the floor, but they weren't prepared for a fight -- they had probably been waiting for the noise of a more traditional army approach, which sounded like a herd of elephants on the stampede punctuated by explosions. None of them got a shot off before they were taken out.

"This is who Schmidt has guarding his stuff?" Jim asked disbelievingly as they prepared to storm the next stairwell.

"The Wehrmacht's been reduced to old men and boys," Monty reminded him. They'd seen that in Germany last month -- prisoners in custody who were decades too old or years too young to fight. "Schmidt's probably down to his dregs, too."

"This isn't where his important stuff is," Steve added as he risked a glance through the metal door's porthole. He saw nothing. "It's in his labs."

Next to him, Bucky stiffened for a heartbeat, then shook himself loose. "Let's go, it's clear."

What Steve and Bucky hadn't realized right up until it was presented to them was that the hangar had more entrances than they could easily cover. They'd assumed multiple points of entry, but two or three, not what looked like five that they could see off the bat.

"What do you want to do?" Bucky asked Steve. They were in a hidden alcove outside the hallway that ran alongside the hangar on two sides, like a concourse in an arena. They were at the apex and could see down both corridors, which were populated but not by guards, instead by technicians and mechanics and flight crews moving around doing their business. "One to a door, fire at anything that moves?"

The hangar's layout meant that it would be manageable with only a couple of men, which was why the Commandos hadn't been given any support for the task, but when they'd plotted it out, they hadn't counted on needing everyone to man an egress point.

"To start with," Steve agreed. "Then Dugan and Jones can fall back here and do the same -- anyone who gets out is going to have to funnel into a hallway. Everyone else sticks to the original plan."

There were catwalks in the hangar and Bucky and Monty were supposed to go up and pick off anyone who looked like trouble (which meant everyone who didn't look like a Commando). Jacques and Jim were to secure the equipment or at least render it inoperable, maybe with Howard's toy, and Steve would play swing man and help out where needed. That was the plan as Steve had presented it in turn to Bucky, Colonel Phillips, and the Commandos.

The actual plan was that Steve was going straight for the plane. Schmidt wasn't in a command post anymore; he'd been watching the assault on the base since the first aerial bombing run had taken out his exposed arty three days ago and the breach of the perimeter would be the last straw. He'd be in the hangar, readying his plane with its horrible payload -- and the tesseract.

"Let's go, then," Bucky agreed, turning back to where the others were waiting and guarding their rear.

No plan survived first contact with the enemy, so everyone expected things to a little pear-shaped once they got into the hangar, although for different reasons. Steve knew it was possible that he'd need to chase the plane again -- or that it was even gone already -- but he prayed it wasn't and that he wouldn't.

"We breach on three," Steve said before they broke cover, Steve and Gabe laying down suppressive fire to clear the corridors before the others ran to their assigned doors. When everyone was in position, Steve held up his gloved hands so that they could be seen and counted down, dropping his hands forcefully on three as the signal.

When the doors opened, Steve could hear jet engines warming up. He left Gabe to hold the corner as Dum Dum pulled back to help, running into the hangar and seeing what he feared: Schmidt's plane in taxiing position. The engines weren't running at speed yet and one was pitched like it had started well after the others, but Steve knew he had no time.

He ran, vaulting over obstacles and deflecting bullets and blue energy blasts until he was running across the tops of the maintenance vehicles, the little jeeps that carried munitions and cargo, to get to the left wing. He could hear shouting -- HYDRA personnel, his Commandos -- but tuned it out in favor of focusing on the engines, for the sounds that would indicate that Schmidt had started his takeoff.

The cockpit on the plane was high and did not have any good angle to see much beyond the wings; it was noisy, both in the cockpit and in the hangar and there was no reason for Schmidt to even realize anything was going on yet unless he got a radio transmission from the control room. Things were happening so quickly and so chaotically that there was an even chance that hadn't happened yet, especially if Bucky and Monty had gotten to the catwalks and shot it up.

He made it to the wing with one last flying leap that he timed badly and singed the heel of his right boot because it had landed on the very tip of the engine casing, but he fell forward and recovered quickly and started running for the plane door. He felt a sharp sting in his left thigh and suspected he'd been shot, but it wasn't an incapacitating wound and he ran on. In less than an hour, it wouldn't matter. It would heal along with the rest of his crash wounds while he waited for the future.

He wrenched open the door and drew his pistol, turning right and heading toward the aft bomb bay because that's where the pilots and ordnance crew were and he needed to thin them out to make this simple for himself. Which was exactly why that was the moment his plan fell apart.

"What the ever-loving _fuck_ , Steve?" Bucky growled as he came through the plane's door, shooting a black-clad HYDRA goon with the blaster pistol in his left hand while keeping his attention -- and his furious expression -- firmly on Steve.

"You shouldn't be here," Steve said as he shot another HYDRA goon, this one a pilot judging by the face mask and goggles.

Around them, the pitch of the engines changed and the plan jerked into motion and then stopped. Steve braced on his feet and was reminded of his thigh wound.

"What, so you and Schmidt can fly off into the sunset together?" Bucky spat as he spun himself into position at Steve's back because they were getting swarmed. "That's who's flying the plane, right?"

The floor shook under them again as the plane inched forward, this time not stopping and instead gaining speed.

"We going fore or aft?" Bucky asked between volleys after Steve said nothing. They were at a junction in the plane's internal pathways and exposed on three sides. The HYDRA men attacking them were doing so with traditional firearms and not the blasters because when it came to stray shots, a rifle made a small hole in a pressurized cabin that could be patched, but a blue energy blast would vaporize enough of the fuselage to bring down the plane. "Because we're doing it as a _we_."

"Aft," Steve sighed. "But you should go, help out the boys. At least tell them what's going on."

They inched toward the rear of the plane, footstep by footstep, firing at all comers until the comers stopped coming. This wasn't all of them, not by a longshot, but it was enough at the moment.

"The boys are fine and they know what's going on," Bucky retorted. "Everyone watched you pull a Jesse Owens for the plane. Including half the 87th -- the cavalry arrived right after we did. So did your girl."

Steve spared a glance back at Bucky, who smirked at him, but he wasn't that surprised. Peggy had been there last time, after all. At least she hadn't sped him to his doom this time. He knew that had bothered her, even as she'd understood the necessity of it.

"We've got no air coverage for the next half-hour," Steve finally answered, since he had to tell Bucky _something_ , even if he still had hopes of getting him off the plane in time, if not necessarily before it took off. Which was probably imminently judging by the vibrations under their feet. "We'll never know where he went or what he's got on board. I don't think he's flying to an island paradise to escape, not in this."

Steve led Bucky to the bomb bay as they took flight; they had to press themselves up against the bulkhead to keep their feet. Once there, they got into another firefight and this time it was the Boston bomb instead of the Chicago one he let fall uselessly into the sky.

"These are the bombs I saw last time," Bucky said with horrified realization as they surveyed the scene. "Philadelphia... New York... Detroit... Jesus Christ. Come on, let's drop the others before he can launch them."

They didn't get the chance, not with a dozen fresh soldiers surrounding them on the outermost catwalks and neither of them with their guns raised.

They were marched to the bridge, where Schmidt's expression changed from annoyance to almost delight when he saw Bucky behind Steve. Bucky was doing his best to pretend that seeing Schmidt for the first time since his rescue meant nothing to him, but Steve could see how untrue this was and suspected Schmidt could as well.

"Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes," Schmidt greeted them. "I would say that I was surprised, but I am not. It is almost appropriate. Biblical, even. You, Captain, with your stolen blessings meant for me and you, Sergeant, my own prodigal son."

"I’m not your son," Bucky spat out, which earned him a clout behind the ear with a rifle butt.

"I am more responsible for your creation, for your _life_ , than the sad bitch who whelped you," Schmidt replied easily, but with conviction. "I have shaped you, given you _form_. I am not your father, Sergeant. I am your _god_."

Bucky’s eyes blazed and Steve was worried he was going to do something that would get him shot or worse. Schmidt might be proud of his work, but that wouldn’t stop him from destroying it. He had to get Bucky out of here – on one of the bomb planes, maybe, which would be easier to get to than finding a parachute. Bucky, unfortunately, was not in the mood to be an active participant in his own salvation and Steve spared a moment to appreciate the reversal of roles. 

“Remember that time on Fulton?” Bucky asked and Steve had just enough time to realize what Bucky was talking about – the two of them had gotten ambushed by a gang of toughs on a day they’d actually been carrying money – when Bucky ripped his left arm free of the guard who’d been holding it and smashed it into his face, destroying it in a spray of blood. From there, the brawl was on. Schmidt shouted in German to stop the Americans, don’t you dare fire your weapons in here, and where are the others? while Steve slipped the shield off his back and used it to bash in the face of the nearest HYDRA goon. They were outnumbered fifteen to two, but it could have been doubled that and it still wouldn’t have ended any other way because those two were super-soldiers. Bucky didn’t have Steve’s globalized martial arts skill set, but he had the savate he’d learned with the Commandos and the brawling he’d learned in Brooklyn and the arm that had been used to kill before it had learned any other task and it wasn’t even close.

Steve was kicking the last of his attackers away from him when he heard Bucky _shout_ , anguished and angry, and he spun to find him with his blaster pistol – which had been taken from him when they’d been captured, but he’d obviously gotten it back – aimed at Schmidt.

“Buck,” Steve called out. “Wait.”

“Why?” Bucky asked, not looking away from Schmidt. He sounded curious, like he might actually be willing to reconsider if Steve gave him a good enough reason. “What are they going to do with him? Give him a show trial? A comfy cell like Zola where he can have his books and his fancy meals and answer a few questions? Do we even have any place that could hold him? Look at all of us. You stay in your cage willingly and I got frozen like a side of beef, but what about him? Does he stay where they put him? Is there any way he pays for what he’s done?”

There was no easy answer, certainly not when Steve knew what HYDRA would do in the future, that killing Schmidt was the only way out of this – if he lived, HYDRA got their new world order decades earlier than 2014 and there would be no way to stop it.

“There’s no way he pays for all of it, no,” Steve agreed. “But we know how to build a cryostasis chamber now. I’m sure that’ll hold him just fine. It’s what he wanted, remember?”

The last was directed at Schmidt, who glared back, but kept most of his attention on Bucky and Steve understood why. Schmidt had never been afraid of Captain America. He’d grudgingly accepted that Steve was the superior physical specimen, but he’d also felt that Steve lacked the necessary killer instinct to be a true threat -- despite Steve's share of the dead bodies lying behind them -- and he'd never understood why Doctor Erskine had chosen the weaker man for the serum's perfected form, which in turn had been Erskine's entire point. And here Steve was now, trying to spare a monster’s life, thereby proving Schmidt's point -- and Erskine's.

Schmidt might be willing to dismiss Steve as a threat, but Schmidt _was_ afraid of Bucky. He could see the darkness behind Bucky’s eyes, fueled by what Schmidt had done to him first in Italy and then in Poland. Steve knew that Schmidt hadn’t created this darkness, that it had always lived inside of Bucky but had been more than balanced out by kindness and gentleness and laughter until the war and then torture had bled that light away drop by drop. But Schmidt didn’t know the details. He wasn’t looking at Bucky like a creator pleased with his work anymore. He was realizing that he’d loosed something that had been better off hidden.

This was why Steve didn’t want Bucky pulling the trigger – not because he was worried about the timeline, not because he thought Schmidt should live to face insufficient justice and pay an insufficient penalty, but because he was afraid that Bucky would let that darkness out and he wouldn’t be around to help bury it again under laughter and kindness and a life lived in the sun.

“Enough,” Schmidt bit out. “Erlkönig.”

Steve watched in horror as Bucky _dropped_ , falling like a marionette with cut strings, eyes rolling back in his head. “Bucky!?!”

He took a step toward Bucky – he couldn’t see if Bucky were still _breathing_ \-- and then froze because Schmidt had his pistols out, one pointed at Steve and the other at the supine Bucky.

“Now, Captain,” Schmidt began conversationally as he moved toward the cockpit, pistols still aimed at him and Bucky, who was not moving. “It is time for you to die nobly so that I may get on with my work.”

Steve knew what Schmidt was going to do before he fired and was already in motion, diving to cover Bucky with his body and the shield and avoiding the blast that had been aimed at him. The pistols weren’t as powerful as the rifles; they wouldn’t disintegrate whatever they touched, but they’d still kill Bucky – who, thank God, wasn’t dead, just unconscious. Steve tried to rouse him, but he was non-responsive; it made sense that Schmidt would have a kill switch for a tool he hadn’t trusted to work properly, but right now, he needed a way to keep Bucky safe and himself free to move and he couldn’t come up with one.

Taking a deep breath to center himself and push away the pain in his thigh, he let it out sharply and then stood and charged Schmidt, hoping to at least get them to the other side of the bridge, closer to the cockpit, and keep the tesseract-core power source between Schmidt and Bucky to put him out of Schmidt’s eyeline.

Schmidt buckled under the force of Steve’s charge, but he didn’t break and he got his feet back under him and then Steve was stumbling. He stopped his forward progress, threw up the shield to block the energy blasts aimed at him, and the chase was on. It went almost exactly the way it did last time, Steve running up into the catwalks – this time to keep Schmidt from remembering that Bucky was lying on the floor nearby – and Schmidt spouting his baloney about a world with no flags but HYDRA’s and Erskine’s folly.

The chase was familiar and not; he'd studied the blueprints of the plane that they'd brought back from Bielefeld and he had his memories, but the two didn't quite overlap. The plane's interior was different in his memories, in the dreams where he'd relived this day over and over again without it ever changing. It was more brightly-lit, cleaner, and less cavern-like in reality, almost sparkling in its newness -- he could smell the faint remnant of paint fumes as he hid behind a girder. Schmidt, too, was different, faster, more agile, more threatening than the dark figure who'd guest-starred in his nightmares. The dialogue still stunk, but the malevolence behind it was blacker and more horrifying because Steve had a better understanding of how deep it went. The Red Skull the first time had been a more garden-variety evil, a hodge-podge of all of the worst of the Reich's rogue's gallery of psychopaths. Now, Bucky was living proof of just how much they had all, on both sides, underestimated Johann Schmidt.

Steve had kept to the catwalks to draw attention away from Bucky, but now he found himself almost trapped at the fore end of the left one, with no ladder and no way down except to jump. Schmidt had realized this and was getting himself into better position to fire by going to the cockpit and standing with his back to the pilot's chair. He misjudged a step climbing backward, not enough to stumble but enough to need to look down to see his footing and that's when Steve jumped. He landed on Schmidt, who in turn landed on the chair, which pushed into the yoke and the plane went into a dive before either of them could move. Schmidt recovered first and kicked the shield with Steve still attached, which sent him flying against the support beam, knocking the wind out of him, as Schmidt pulled the plane out if its dive before they had to fight on the ceiling.

From his position, Steve could see the legs of one of the guards they'd taken down earlier and the arm of another; they were in a tangled semi-circle at the rear of the bridge; Bucky was out of his line of sight, closer to the power core, and Steve spared a thought for him as he considered his next move. He could take out the power core now -- there was a clear shot for a throw of the shield -- but he had to get himself into a position where Schmidt's move after that would be to go to the tesseract and not anything else. So he ran across the bridge, from the left side to the right, drawing Schmidt's attention and his fire. 

His new location was further away, leaving the power core closer to Schmidt, and from here he could see that Bucky, who still hadn't moved at all, was far enough from the core's pedestal base that he would likely be clear of the sparks and flying shards. 

"There is nowhere to run, Captain," Schmidt explained as if Steve were a child. "Not from your destiny and not from mine."

Steve laughed, he couldn't help himself. "You're right," he agreed with a smile. And then he threw the shield at the power core, shattering its cover and knocking the tesseract from its housing. There was a ripple of blue-tinged energy that Steve felt first in his bones and then as every electrical device aboard the plane sputtered and coughed and most of it died. Not all of it, if he’d done it right; he’d still have some flap and rudder control, enough to veer the plane off course from the US and into the North Sea.

Schmidt shrieked. “Do you know what you’ve done?” he asked in shocked disbelief as he ran over to the destroyed core.

“Yeah," Steve confirmed. "I know exactly what I did.”

In the half-second before Schmidt reached the core, Steve realized what he should have done and hated his own single-mindedness. The tesseract wasn’t just a battery, it was a genie’s lamp. He could have held it and gotten Bucky to safety and made sure the timeline wasn’t disturbed and then gone back to the future without having to crash the plane again.

He took a step forward, ready to fight Schmidt for the tesseract, but he was too late. Schmidt had it in his hand and Steve froze, like he'd been compelled not to move and Schmidt smiled at him. But that smile turned into a grimace and Schmidt _howled_ , in anger or agony or both, and he disappeared in a flash. Steve watched the tesseract fall and tried to force himself to move, to grab for it, but he couldn't, not with all of his enhanced strength and not with all of his native will, and it fell, burning its way through the plane’s floor and into its watery slumber until Howard dug it out of the silt.

Steve felt himself released from whatever spell had held him, but stayed where he was for a moment because he was lightheaded, not from the exertion but from realizing what had almost happened -- and what had still happened. He was still on course for the future. The last step was a doozy, though, and he now had one more thing to get done before that: he had to get Bucky off of the plane.

Bucky was still where he’d fallen and didn’t rouse as Steve brushed the debris that had landed on him off his face and out of his hair and then untangled his limbs to make him more comfortable. The plane was flying steady now; he probably had about twenty minutes before he would have to put it into its dive, although he supposed it could be longer. This part wasn’t exactly precise. It was even less precise after he went to look at the cockpit because all of the controls and meters were fried, along with the radio. He and Bucky were alone in the sky, no Peggy, no anyone, and Steve bit his cheek in bitter disappointment. This part, saying goodbye to Bucky and then watching the ice and water speed toward him and praying he was doing it right and he woke up in the future, this part was going to be hard enough as it was without having to do it alone.

Forcing himself to move, he ran aft to the bomb bays to see if the little bomb planes had an autopilot setting so that he could use it as an escape pod for Bucky. He wasn’t really surprised when there wasn’t, since Schmidt would have probably been happier not to have to use human pilots if he hadn’t needed to, but it was all a moot point anyway because the bomb doors were all frozen shut when the tesseract had done its thing.

When he got back to the bridge, Bucky was starting to stir, so Steve went to him.

“Hey, hey,” he said softly as Bucky groaned and then tensed, remembering where he was. “We’re safe. It’s safe.”

Bucky opened his eyes and Steve saw such despair that he nearly looked away, but then it was gone as if it had never been there. “Where’s Schmidt?” Bucky asked instead.

“Dead,” Steve answered, helping Bucky sit up. “I broke the plane and it killed him.”

Bucky gave him a searching look, like he suspected that Steve hadn’t given him the whole truth and nothing but.

“I broke the plane knowing it would kill him,” Steve amended. “He was trying to kill me. I’m okay with it.”

That earned him a grin that was both darkly satisfied and yet still fond and a little grateful. "Good on ya."

Bucky tried to stand using Steve’s arm for leverage, but his legs were rubbery so he sat, still holding on, and Steve explained what had happened and what they needed to do now. Bucky was fine with the plan right up until Steve said that the parachute, if found, would be for him.

“If anyone has to go down with this ship,” Bucky said fiercely, grabbing Steve by the buckle on his chest with his prosthetic arm, “it’s going to be me.”

“Buck!” Steve groaned, trying to pull away, but he was held in place and forced to look Bucky in the eye.

"I've been living on borrowed time," Bucky said with a sad smile and Steve could see all of the pain that he’d been hiding, not just since his rescue from Poland, but since Steve had found him strapped to a table. War had taken so much from him. "I was lucky I didn't die a dumbass private in Africa, but I used all of that up by the time HYDRA got their hands on me. I should've died on Zola's table. I should've died falling off that damned train. I should've died in Poland when they were turning me into Frankenstein's monster. I figure I got two more years than I had any right to ask for, any right to hope for. If I'm gonna be greedy for anything else, if I have earned the right to ask for _anything_ at all, then it's for you.

“You were never supposed to be here, Steve. You were supposed to be home, safe. But you're here and I gotta do what I can to make sure you can go home. Especially because I can't."

Steve tried to interrupt again, but Bucky’s hand on his chest tightened. "The trigger wasn't the only thing they left in me. I'm too messed up inside to even pretend I'm not. You wanna imagine I'm gonna go home after this and find a job and a wife and name a kid after you, that's your business, but it's not going to be what happens. I'm not going to trap some gal into a life of holding me together and cowering in fear when she can't. I'm not going to go study on the GI bill and get a job waiting tables. I'm going end up doing the SSR's dirty work, the same thing HYDRA was building me to do, just for other side this time. They've already asked."

Steve started at that, but he shouldn't have been surprised, he realized. The SSR would become SHIELD and SHIELD had always continued as it had begun. It was why HYDRA had gotten in so deep. 

"They've wanted me to go off on my own and do stuff once they realized I wasn't too cracked in the head," Bucky confirmed, an ugly smile on his face. He didn't call the SSR the good guys, just the other guys. Bucky had always been more worldly and cynical than him. "I told them that I wasn't leaving your side. They're okay waiting."

"So you'd rather _die_ than do that?" Steve asked, more curious than exasperated or horrified. He’d known Bucky hadn’t been nearly as okay as he’d been pretending, but he hadn’t realized it had been that bad and he wondered if he had been too caught up in his own head to see it or if Bucky had simply gotten a lot better at hiding it. "You could disappear, go live your life how you want to. Forget what I want for you, forget what they want for you."

Bucky sighed. 

"I don't want to die at all," he said vehemently, meeting Steve’s eyes and holding them so that Steve would believe him. And he did. "But I don't want _you_ to die more than that. So if there's a way to point this thing at an iceberg and both of us living to see it explode in the distance, then that's my first choice. But if one of us has to hold on to the yoke, it ain’t gonna be you and I’ll fight you over it and I’ll win."

Steve smiled at him and he felt tears in his eyes. “Not this time, Buck. I don’t have a choice. I have to go back where I came from.”

Bucky shook his head and tried standing again, this time succeeding. “What the hell are you talking about? You going to fly this thing to Brooklyn?”

Steve laughed, but it didn’t sound happy. It didn’t feel happy. “You’re not the only one with someone else who looks like you living under your skin.”

With nothing else to do and no time to look for other options, Steve finally told his tale. He told Bucky of how history had gone the first time for Captain America, with Bucky dead and no love affair with Peggy, just more war and then this, flying the plane into the icy water and the death he hadn’t wanted but also hadn’t gotten. He told Bucky about the future and the Chitauri and then HYDRA and, finally, the Winter Soldier.

Bucky stood there, stock-still, and listened, the expression on his face and his body language moving slowly from incredulity to belief. It was ridiculous, but at the same time, it made things that had never seemed right make sense. This was why Steve had been so different, too different for eight months apart to explain. This was why he’d known so much about what would happen in places like Bielefeld, why he fought differently now, why he _acted_ differently now. Bucky seemed almost _relieved_ by this part of the revelation, like it was confirmation that it wasn't in his head or, worse, that it wasn't something he'd done. 

But when he heard about the Winter Soldier, Bucky tensed back up. He shook his head jerkily as he heard about the Winter Soldier's legacy as a specter of death and destruction, about seventy years of torture and conditioning and freezing in his cryostasis prison granting him a non-life that turned him against everything – and everyone – he’d ever loved.

“I couldn’t save you in the future, Buck,” Steve admitted, letting the tears flow and wiping them away with his fist like he had as a kid. “You didn’t want me to. Please let me do it now. _Please._ ”

Bucky just stared at him, looking as wrecked as Steve felt. He waited, watching Bucky, as the silence stretched. Then Bucky shook his head and smiled, bitter and fond and exasperated and not just a little like his NCO smile, the one he wore when he was watching an officer do something correctable and dumb. Usually Steve.

"You want to go live in the future, that's one thing,” Bucky said in a rough voice as he bent down to pick up his pistols. “But you don't owe anyone anything anymore. They can fight their aliens and dinosaurs without you. They made do for seventy years without you, they can keep on going. And did you even _once_ wonder if maybe the future’ll be better if you stay here, fix what’s coming before it happens? Like you did with me and the Winter Soldier.”

He waited for Steve to challenge him, but Steve honestly didn’t know what to say in that moment. Of course he'd wondered about, but he'd never allowed himself to really consider it as an option because the risks had always seemed too high. He didn’t _want_ to go live in the future, he had just accepted that he would have to. He didn't understand how time travel worked, not outside the pulp novels he'd read as a kid and tried to illustrate for his portfolios. He'd assumed that anything he did would have an effect, chose his changes based on what he could live with, and hoped everything would balance out in the end. There'd been no one to talk to, no one to bat ideas around with, and if there were, would they have any surer knowledge? Or would they be like Bucky, simply pointing out where Steve's own logic had failed and guessing on the future as well. 

“You think on it,” Bucky told him when Steve said nothing. “I’m going to find a parachute or something to get us off this thing and then some tape to hold the yoke in place.”

And then he walked – stalked – off, leaving Steve to stand uselessly for a moment before he went back up to the cockpit and the wrecked chair to see if he couldn’t get the radio or the altimeter to work. He sat down, pulled out the compass with Peggy’s picture on it, and tried to see if what Tony had cheerfully called 'percussive maintenance' would fix anything.

He was still banging away when Bucky returned with his arms full of supplies.

“I found a couple of chutes that seem to be intact, an inflatable raft that got shot up during one of our set-tos, and this,” he announced, presenting Steve with a portable radio. “Go see if you can call your girl and get us a lift while I try to fix the raft.”

“Buck,” Steve began, “I—“

“You want to save me?” Bucky asked challengingly as he knelt down at Steve’s side, tapping his knee so that Steve would turn and give him better access to the bullet wound in his thigh, which had not stopped bleeding yet, but it was more of a trickle than a flood. Bucky pulled a strip of cloth and some tape from his pile and set to work. “You are gonna have to live to do it. Live _now_. You think I’m going to get fixed in a day? You think I’m going to get fixed _at all_ watching you die for me?”

After he finished tying off the knot, Bucky stood up with the rest of his supplies and carried them over to an empty space where he could work.

“You had a life in the future, I get that,” he went on as he shook out the deflated raft violently.. “You have friends there, a place in that world, and I’m asking you to give it up. But I am. We need you here, too, Steve. _I_ need you here. Peggy would probably like you to stick around, too. And a few other folks. You still want to play hero, you still want to save your friends in the future? You can start in their past.”

And then he sat down and started taping and sewing, using cloth and plastic and tape to make patches. It wouldn’t hold, the repairs, but maybe enough for a rescue plane to find the raft. A rescue plane nobody knew where to send because he still hadn’t contacted Peggy. 

Steve opened up the radio case and exhaled loudly because it might have been portable, but it wasn't simple. But whatever the radio had been stored in protected it from the blast that had taken out the plane’s electronics because it turned on and made noise when he tried it.

"I don't want to hurt anyone," he said quietly as he skimmed the instructions to figure out how to set the dials. "I hoped that I could make sure you were okay and that I didn't mess up the future too much by doing that. I don't... I'm not choosing the future over you, Buck. Over here and now. I'm just trying not to screw anyone over and be able to live with myself afterward."

They worked in silence for a few moments, the only sounds coming from the uncooperative radio. 

"You should have higher goals than that, Steve," Bucky said, not looking up from his work when Steve peered over his shoulder. "You're allowed to think of yourself once in a while."

He had, which was why Bucky was currently sitting trying to mend an inflatable raft instead of lying in his cryostasis chamber as it rolled east into Russia. 

"I don't know that this is one of those whiles," he said, looking at the diagram once more and flipping a switch he'd missed. "It's not just me who has to live with my choice -- everyone in the future does. I know how everyone here gets by -- the people I care about. They all have great lives, Buck. They really do. And now you have a chance at one when you didn't before. Isn't that enough?"

"Not if you are miserable until the end of time because of it, no," Bucky answered, shifting the raft like he was arranging his blanket in bed so that he could get to a different part. "You're doing it because you think you have to, not because you want to. You haven't once said that you like it there."

Steve chuffed out a laugh. "I like some of it. The food's good, the music's interesting, the cars are nice..."

"Which means you don't have a girl and no friends to speak of, but you've got HYDRA running the country and I'm rattling around like the Ghost of Christmas Future. Christ, Rogers, why is this even a question?"

"There are people I miss," Steve corrected. "They're the reason I have to go back -- I don't want to change their lives beyond recognition."

"Even if it's for the better?" Bucky asked over the rustle of plastic as he shifted the raft once more. "That's selfish, not selfless. Especially because you already did it for me."

Steve was stunned a little bit by the rebuke, but he had no reply because he had finally hit the right combination of switches and got the SSR's radio. 

“Oh, thank God!” Peggy didn’t bother to hide her relief when she came to the radio. He told her what had happened and where he thought they were, which was very much an approximation. “Can you turn the plane around, land it somewhere safe?”

“No can do,” Steve answered as he looked over the cockpit meters and dials. “Even if I had that much control, which I don’t, we’re sitting on enough explosives to wipe out half the United States and we’ve got no landing gear and no avionics. I’m not going back over a populated area, even Europe.”

“It would improve things,” Bucky muttered loudly from the floor.

“Sergeant Barnes thinks it would improve property values,” Steve duly reported and he heard Peggy cover a sob with a laugh. “He’s trying to jury-rig a way off this thing, if we could maybe get a lift home after we ditch?”

“Does that mean you’re staying or you just don’t want to break her heart where you can hear it?” Bucky asked around a mouthful of needle and thread.

Steve didn’t reply. He wanted to stay, wanted to believe that he could have his cake and eat it, too, have his present and give his future a brighter alternative. 

“We’ve already got two planes up,” Peggy said, drawing his attention very firmly back to the present. “If you can take the radio with you, we’ll be able to find you faster. But stay with the plane as long as you can. You’ll be safer there.”

They would’ve been and he’d been in the process of agreeing when a loud explosion rocked the plan, sending it teetering. Steve grabbed the yoke, trying to keep it out of a spin, but it was going to be a losing battle. One he was surprisingly bitter about considering all that had gone on just now. He hadn't had a choice, then he had, and now it was taken away from him again. 

“We just lost an engine,” he reported. Behind him, Bucky was already on his feet and moving around. “I don’t think we’re gonna be able to hang on any longer.”

The yoke’s response was sluggish and not enough. They were veering to the right, slowly but surely, and from there it would be into a spiral and there would be no way out of it – or off the plane – once it began.

“Peggy, I love you,” he said and yanked off the headset before she could reply, standing up and holding on to the broken chair because the floor was at such a steep angle. Bucky was holding on to what was left of the power core.

“We’re too low down for chutes by now,” Bucky said and then smiled. “I guess you win.”

“Didn’t want to,” Steve admitted as he bounced hard off a support beam as he tried to make his way to Bucky. “You want to stay or go?”

“I’d rather freeze to death without a chance of decapitation or losing any more limbs in the crash,” Bucky replied sourly. “Let’s go.”

They slid on their butts to the side of the plane with the little door and it took Bucky two tries with his metal arm to wrench it open. The icy air nearly blew them first in and then out, but they held on.

"You live through this?" Bucky shouted over the whistling air.

"Did the first time," Steve answered.

"Good enough," Bucky said with a grin and grabbed Steve and pushed him out of the plane. As Steve fell, he could see Bucky jumping after him. This, too, must've been part of the future-past, but Bucky probably wouldn't get a chance to save him this time.

He hit the water with a hard landing, but not a damaging one because they both had parachutist wings for a reason and knew how to fall. 

Steve had been unconscious for this part the first time he'd frozen to not-death, a serious head wound that had healed while he’d slept, and while he’d imagined it a thousand times, he’d never figured on the water being so cold, so devastatingly frigid that even his enhanced metabolism couldn’t prevent the shock. He had to force himself to move and then again because his body hadn’t responded the first time. He swam toward Bucky, who was looking like he was having the same trouble.

“Here,” Bucky said miserably as he treaded water, holding up a coil of rope and a heavy metal chain. “We’re not going to be conscious long and whoever finds us – Howard or his genius kid from the future – it will be easier if we’re together.”

Steve helped Bucky tie and chain themselves together. Neither of them thought the planes would get here in time before they went hypothermic, but Steve suspected that Bucky also wasn’t sure he would survive at all, that either of them would in case Steve’s first time had been some sort of happy accident. The serum that ran through their veins was different, Steve’s the perfect version and Bucky’s the weaker attempt to recreate it, and Steve prayed that it would be enough, that both would be enough, and that wherever – whenever – they wound up, it would be together and alive.

"The future's gonna be awesome," Steve told Bucky, hearing his words already start to slur. "You'll love it."

They were wrapped around each other like lovers and he whispered in Bucky's ear about iPods and the internet and the Dodgers and Giants and how the old industrial area by the Manhattan Bridge was now some of the most expensive real estate in New York. Bucky had already closed his eyes and, after a while, he first stopped making comments and then non-verbal reactions and then there was nothing at all. Steve was starting to fade, too. He wasn’t even keeping his eyes open and he couldn’t tell if Bucky was even breathing anymore because he'd gotten too cold to feel anything and Bucky's breaths had gotten so shallow.

And then it was quiet.


	6. Chapter 6

The first sense that came back was sound and Steve heard the music before he could identify it as such, first as noise and then resolving into song. He didn’t have the energy to move or speak or open his eyes, so he listened to the singing and the regular, muted beeping he recognized from his most recent hospitalization as a heart monitor, and voices that his sluggish brain didn’t recognize immediately and then did.

“—when he’s ready. He’s stable,” Sam was explaining. “He’s just sleeping. It’s fine.”

“Then why is he _crying_?” Tony asked combatively.

 _Because it had been a dream_ , Steve answered in his head. He was back in 2014, in Avengers Tower, and Bucky wasn’t safe nearby, he was the Winter Soldier setting fire to his past. There had been no time travel. The magic amulet hadn’t sent him home, it had just knocked him out. The disappointment was crushing and he was glad when the darkness took him again.

When he next surfaced, the music had changed. It was familiar, but not. He recognized Jo Stafford’s voice, but not the song. Something after he’d gone into the ice, then. Someone’s attempt to soothe him, meant well but doing more harm than good because all it did was remind him of what he’d never had but still felt the pangs of loss from leaving behind. It was all still so sharp and clear in his mind, like a memory, and not receding into the mists of slumber like a dream the longer he was awake.

The room was darkened, he could tell that without opening his eyes, and he assumed he was alone because there was no other noise but from the music and the ambient sounds of the medical suite. He lay there and listened for a while, the songs changing seamlessly the way they did in the future, no hisses and pops in the silence between tracks. Sinatra, Helen O’Connell, the Ink Spots, Dinah Shore, all voices reminding him of both his real history and the dream-history and the competing sets of images hurt so very much right now.

“JARVIS? Silence, please,” he said quietly, his voice coming out rusty and rough, but his words clear enough to be understood – JARVIS had long ago gotten used to Tony’s slurred commands – and the music stopped.

“I was listening to that.”

Steve opened his eyes with a start and looked over to his left and saw a glint of moonlight off of a metal forearm.

“Buck?” It came out barely a whisper, raw and hoarse, and if he was hallucinating, then it would be easy enough to pretend he’d said something else.

“About time you got you got up, you lazy bum,” Bucky said and, a moment later, the lights brightened a little – not all the way, but enough for Steve to see that it really was Bucky, with the half-metal arm and the gash on his face from the fight with Schmidt’s goons. Steve didn’t think his imagination was vivid enough to put Bucky in his Mets #BuckUp t-shirt, although Tony’s sense of humor certainly went that far. “You dragged me into the future and then abandoned me, Buster.”

Steve could do nothing but stare for a long moment. It was Bucky as he remembered him from his dream-memories of 1945, which maybe hadn’t been dreams after all. But how?

“Magic,” Bucky answered sourly because that last bit had apparently been out loud. Now that Steve was more fully alert, he could see tension in Bucky’s posture, the brittleness in his expression. He looked overwhelmed, which was understandable all considering, and like he was holding on by sheer force of will. Which probably explained why he’d been sitting in a dark room listening to songs that would feel familiar. “You messed around with some alien trinket or some alien trinket messed around with you, I don’t know. The house talks and people fly and everyone here acts like that’s normal, so what the hell you did that’s so special, I can’t guess.”

Steve chuckled as he pushed himself up in the bed, smiling softly at Bucky’s frown. “Not laughing at you,” he assured, although Bucky’s eyes were still narrowed in suspicion. “I just... I woke up earlier and heard Sam and Tony and I thought I’d only dreamed that I’d gone back in time and it... it crushed me, Buck. It really did. It was like that first morning after the day I woke up in 2011. I fell asleep praying I’d wake up in 1945 again, that it hadn’t been real, but it was and I didn’t.” He paused, looking down at his hands. “It was a lot harder this time.”

Bucky sighed and Steve looked up and Bucky’s glare had been replaced by something more familiar, a fond, worn exasperation that asked ‘what the hell did you get us into this time, Rogers?’ without saying a word while also promising to have Steve’s back no matter what. We’ll cling to each other until we figure this out, same as always.

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” Bucky said with a lightness that he didn’t even pretend was real. “People – and houses – are talking to me, so I don’t think I’m a figment of your imagination.”

Steve smiled at that, unable to hide his gladness, his _relief_ , and Bucky rolled his eyes and smirked back, but then he sobered. “Your friends had a lot of questions.”

And Bucky, no matter what the date on the calendar said, was not comfortable with those answers. From the way he had tucked his prosthetic under his other arm against his stomach as he’d spoken, it wasn’t hard to guess what most of the questions had been about.

“I’m sure,” Steve agreed, then thought of something. “JARVIS, did you have standing orders to alert anyone when I woke up?”

The clock on the far wall of the semi-darkened room said that it was a quarter after two in the morning, which might explain why nobody had rushed into the room by now, but possibly not entirely.

“Ms. Potts has modified the standing orders to rely on your discretion between the hours of 0100 and 0600 or when Sergeant Barnes is present, Captain.”

Which was a nice way of saying that Pepper had gone behind Tony’s back, at the very least – probably Sam’s as well. He appreciated the thoughtfulness, though, to give him a chance to clear his head and for him and Bucky to talk before everyone barged in. For Bucky’s sake as well as his own.

“Is there anything wrong with me?”

“You want a list?” Bucky asked at the same time that JARVIS reported that he was cleared to self-discharge from medical observation.

“I don’t want your list,” Steve told Bucky as he pushed the blankets back and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He was dressed in an Avengers t-shirt and hospital scrub pants and was barefoot, but that was enough to go back to his apartment. “Your list is full of made-up things. I’m the peak of human perfection, everyone knows that.”

“The future didn't fix your ego any,” Bucky retorted, but he looked a little relieved that Steve was teasing him instead of talking to the walls that talked back.

Steve did, however, tell JARVIS that he was going up to his apartment and that the others could be told when they woke up. “Come on,” Steve said, gesturing with his hand to Bucky.

“I know where you live,” Bucky replied, following behind. “I’ve been sleeping in your bed for two days.”

Steve looked around as they made their way to the elevator and then up to his apartment, looking for anything that would indicate what changes he’d made to the timestream. But he’d been in the past for more than six months and he hadn’t exactly memorized how he’d left his apartment when he’d gone off fight dinosaurs, so if there were changes to it, he didn’t remember. The calendar next to his fridge still said August 2014, but whether that was because it still was August or because nobody had thought to change it, he didn’t know.

“Eat, sleep, or talk?” Steve asked Bucky, who’d leaned against the kitchen island holding his elbows. He was pretty sure Bucky wasn’t going to choose the last one, even if it was just him. The tension in his posture put spotlights on his frayed edges, exhaustion only making them easier to see.

“Sleep,” Bucky said, giving Steve a smile that said that he understood that he was hiding nothing. “You’ve been snoring for three days, but I haven’t slept much.”

Whether it was general unease at being in the future or wanting to keep an eye on him, Steve didn’t know. Probably both. Bucky had been through too much to take anyone’s good intentions at their words alone, even people who’d undoubtedly assured him that they were Steve’s friends. He’d likely spent the last few days on high alert, waiting for Steve to wake up so that something, anything, would make sense.

“Sleep it is, then,” Steve agreed, starting to walk toward the bedroom without waiting to see if Bucky followed. He did, of course. “You get a tour of my dresser or are you just putting on what people give you?”

Bucky made a noise of protest, but Steve turned and looked pointedly at the shirt Bucky was wearing and Bucky shrugged. “It fits.”

“In more ways than one,” Steve agreed. Bucky hit him on the arm.

“Who got you the pants?” Steve asked, since Bucky was wearing jeans that fit too well to be his own and were too new-looking to be anyone else’s.

“Sam?” Bucky replied and Steve took the interrogative tone to mean that Bucky didn’t know if Sam had done anything more than hand them over. Bucky plucked at the material at his thigh. “I think they’re a little small, but I didn’t want to say anything.”

Steve chuckled because they were regular jeans. “No, that’s just how they wear them now. Be happy nobody got you skinny jeans – they look like my old tights and everybody wears them.”

Bucky looked horrified, then dubious like he thought Steve might be putting him on, then back to horrified when he realized Steve was not.

“You want to shower?” Steve asked, gesturing with his chin toward the bathroom. He was a little gamey-smelling himself, but nothing that couldn’t wait.

“Yeah,” Bucky agreed, rubbing at his cheek, then smirking. “Don’t worry, I figured it out.”

Steve waited for the bathroom door to click shut before looking around for his tablet, which turned out to be on the side table next to the couch. He turned it on and was relieved to see the date was only a week after he’d disappeared in Houston. He opened up the browser and the headline on the news websites were all of a piece with what he’d have expected before he went back in time: coverage of the cleanup in Houston and what was being done with both the dinosaur corpses and Namor’s very alive body, reality star gossip masquerading as important news, more articles on high-profile politicians and power-brokers who’d been confirmed as HYDRA adherents, the upcoming baseball trade deadlines. He skimmed the headlines and the blurbs, but nothing struck him as an obvious departure from what he’d remembered before – the names and places and faces were identical.

The only article he clicked on was the one that reported that neither SHIELD nor the Avengers were making Captain America available for interviews, leading to speculation that he was more seriously injured than had initially been reported – and possibly casting doubt on the announcement that he’d returned at all. On the page there was a link to the original reportage on his disappearance in Houston and return three days later, but it told him nothing because it was clearly a snow job by either Maria Hill or SHIELD’s PR department. It didn’t say where he’d returned, although he could surmise that it hadn’t been a public place by the lack of eyewitness accounts or photographs, and Bucky wasn’t mentioned at all, either by name or as a mystery second man found at the scene. He’d have to ask someone later; Bucky might have details, but they’d probably be a little garbled by his lack of contextual understanding.

Bucky. Steve clicked over to Wikipedia and found Bucky’s page... which was unchanged since the last time Steve had looked at it. James Buchanan Barnes had died 5 September 1944 on the mission to capture HYDRA scientist Emil Zola, end of his story. There had been no rescue from Poland, no return to the Commandos, no going down in the plane crash with Captain America, no return from the dead three days ago, and no Winter Soldier.

The Winter Soldier still existed, however, which perplexed Steve when he searched. If Bucky had been pulled out of the cryo tank in Poland, who was the Winter Soldier? Was it possible that Bucky was alive twice in one time? Or had HYDRA simply replaced one experiment with another and found someone else to commit their sins, as Steve had assumed they would?

“I’m not too sure about the rest of it, but I’ll admit I like the showers in the future,” Bucky announced as he emerged from the bathroom, towel wrapped around his waist as he headed for the bedroom. “I left you hot water.”

“I don’t think this place runs out of hot water,” Steve said, warm within for seeing Bucky relaxed and smiling, even if it was only for a moment. The future must be terrifying for him, Steve knew, so foreign that he couldn’t even understand how much (or how little) danger he was in because he’d never be able to identify the threats. It had been like that for him, too, but he hadn’t been through what Bucky had been through and he didn’t have the scars that made trusting strangers to do right by him impossible. Bucky would thaw out a little, he knew that, but right now, he had to remember to be more mindful of what would be new and incomprehensible to someone who’d been in 1945 a couple of days ago. It would be easier now because he would have to adjust to the future again, too – picking up his tablet and talking to JARVIS was simple, but just as getting used to the everyday details of the 1940s again had taken time before it had become completely instinctive, so would this.

He left the tablet on the couch and went to take his own shower, using the opportunity to look over his own body. He hadn’t seen his own reflection since he’d woken up and was surprised to see himself looking like he had in 2014 and not 1945, his hair shorter, his fingernails less ragged, and he wasn’t carrying the wounds he’d received in the assault on Škrlatica – no bullet wound in his thigh, no cuts on his forearm, no bruises. He didn’t know how that was possible, but he wasn’t sure how he’d gotten back to the future, either, so maybe there was an explanation.

When he went into the bedroom to get clothes, Bucky was sitting on the bed holding a copy of _The Maltese Falcon_ , presumably from Steve’s bookshelf, and was wearing a pair of pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. The book wasn’t open and Steve got the impression that Bucky had been waiting for him, but Bucky said nothing and opened the book.

“I guess we’ll straighten out the living situation tomorrow – later today,” Steve said as he put on his pajamas. “There’s a second bedroom here I have my art stuff in now – at least I think I do. And there’s enough empty space in the Tower to host a village, so you can probably have your own place as soon as you want it. Or elsewhere, you’re not stuck here if you don’t want to be.”

He didn’t want to presume that Bucky would want to live with him, but he also thought it would be more comfortable for Bucky in the short-term as he got used to the future.

“Where else can I go?” Bucky asked bemusedly as he closed the book again, finger holding his place. “I got no money, no clue how to get by, no identity – I don’t exist.”

“No!” Steve might’ve shouted a little because Bucky startled. He took a deep breath before continuing. “You exist, okay? You exist.”

He couldn’t explain how close to the surface that dream-not-dream feeling from earlier still was, that he’d _imagined_ going back in time to save Bucky, and how much it still scared him.

But maybe Bucky saw because he gave Steve a half smile. “I know I’m here, flesh and bone and vibranium alloy,” he said, holding up his left arm. “But I’m still seventy years dead according to the War Department and your pals don’t want to tell anyone otherwise. So I got nowhere else to go, nowhere else I _can_ go. They don't want me stepping outside, either.”

Steve sat on the other side of the bed. “We’ll get everything straightened out,” he assured, meaning it. He considered what might have been the likeliest possibilities for why the others wanted to keep Bucky’s identity a mystery – Bucky would have phrased it differently if they’d simply wanted to wait until Steve woke. But his analysis was hampered by the fact that he wasn’t sure what had changed in this future he’d returned to, what details were different from what he’d left behind, and how the most likely changes had to do with Bucky himself. “I can’t explain what I don’t know, but if I were to hazard a guess, they want to hide you from HYDRA.”

Bucky reacted to that, eyes wide, before he shook himself free of the memories. Or at least he tried to; Steve could still see their shadows in his face.

“I don’t know what kind of records HYDRA has on you now,” Steve went on. “Whether they have anything at all, even. But even if they have nothing, you’re still a target to them as Bucky Barnes, Howling Commando. You’re a hero from a bygone age in an uncertain time and one side is going to want to exploit you and the other is going to want to kill you.”

He hadn’t been able to keep the bitterness out of his voice and that, possibly more than anything, chased Bucky’s haunted expression. “This is you talking from personal experience, I’m guessing,” Bucky asked sourly, not making it a question. But then he smiled, genuine and amused. “Well, at least that’s familiar.”

And then he yawned. Steve looked at the bedside clock; it was a few minutes after three in the morning. “You should get some sleep,” he told Bucky. “It’s going to be a long day once everyone else gets up.”

Bucky nodded and put the book on the nightstand, turning back to Steve sharply when Steve got up off the bed.

“I’m just going to get something,” Steve said, pretending he hadn’t seen the panic flash in Bucky’s eyes. He wasn’t the only one afraid the other would disappear, he supposed. “I’ll be right back.”

He went into the living room to get his tablet and returned to Bucky arranging his pillows and the blanket. Bucky looked curiously at the tablet when he sat down, but not with any excitement and turned on his side away from Steve (and the light). He'd undoubtedly seen so much new technology in the last few days that it all blurred. It certainly had for him back in 2011, flat-screen color televisions and cell phones and then devices for which he hadn't even understand the concept, like anything to do with the internet. And he'd been in SHIELD custody, with its budget-driven tech lag and twentieth-century physical space, not wandering around in Tony Stark's futuristic dream house.

The first thing he did was go to his feed reader and work his way through the news headlines from the past week, seeing what he’d missed and whether anything was different, but the deeper look confirmed what the quick glance earlier had suggested: nothing had changed. It was all familiar, in theme if not in particulars, and he couldn’t understand how that could be. He should have changed _something_ , but he hadn’t, even the things he had absolutely made different – why was Bucky’s rescue from Poland and return to the Commandos not part of history? How could _nothing_ have changed?

And if nothing had changed, then who was the Winter Soldier?

Steve waited until he heard Bucky snuffling quietly in sleep next to him before he carefully got up and went into the living room and the section that had been set up as his office with a desk and filing cabinets. In the taller cabinet, in the top drawer, was his Winter Soldier file, although file was a misnomer at this point – it took up most of the drawer. He opened it and was surprised to see it empty... save for a single piece of paper.

_Steve – Neither you nor Sgt. Barnes needs to see this right now. We’ll talk in person. Natasha_

He exhaled loudly in frustration. He was gratified by the sentiment, but he didn’t appreciate the coddling. He could ask JARVIS to retrieve the online versions, but he supposed he already had the answer he’d been looking for: the Winter Soldier was still Bucky. Which made no more sense than anything else, but apparently he was going to have to wait for that answer.

He went back into the bedroom, where he was completely unsurprised to see that, even in sleep, Bucky had taken the opportunity to steal the blankets the minute there wasn't two hundred pounds of counterweight holding them down. Rather than try to take them back from the burrito on the far end -- he'd been losing that fight since 1925 and his increased mass hadn't changed the outcome -- he lay down and closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, the clock next to the bed said that it was 8:15 and Bucky was not there. Steve found him in the bathroom shaving and then went into the kitchen to start water for coffee. He was putting slices of rye bread in the toaster when the doorbell rang -- it had been enough time for JARVIS to alert people that they were up.

Bucky answered the door because he'd been walking past it when it rang. He looked over to Steve, who nodded, and then admitted Natasha, whom Steve had expected to be his first visitor, before continuing on to the bedroom.

"Welcome back," Natasha said, taking a seat on a stool at the kitchen island. "How are you feeling?"

"Disoriented," Steve replied, leaning against the sink. "It's been a long, strange, trip and I'm not sure what I've come back to."

Natasha nodded, acknowledging both Steve's predicament -- only he would know what was different about what he'd remembered -- and, he was sure, her own part in it by removing the files.

"But you brought back a nice souvenir," she pointed out, gesturing toward the bedroom with her head. "He's a remarkable man."

It was a strong statement for Natasha to make, both in that she wasn't easily impressed by anyone and that three days was a short time to form a judgment, even if those days had been supplemented by a lot of history. Not for the first time, Steve wondered what Bucky had been up to -- or subjected to -- while he'd been sleeping.

"He is," he agreed. "But I need to ask about his... future. I saw the note."

Another nod from Natasha, this one short and sharp and singular. "I didn't want you to..." she trailed off, then started again. "He's dead. And I didn't want you to find out from a file."

He was already leaning back, so there was nowhere to go, but he still braced his hands on the countertop in surprise and _grief_. Any version of Bucky dying was going to hurt too much for him to breathe. "Was it because--" Had bringing Bucky from 1945 to the present caused his future self to stop existing? Would that make it better or worse, to replace the shattered Winter Soldier with a less damaged model? He'd meant for the Winter Soldier never to have existed in the first place, which was different from making him _cease to exist._

"He died before you went back in time," Natasha said gently, looking down at her hands for a moment before returning her gaze to him. "That's where I was before you went to Houston."

Steve closed his eyes and shook his head because this, this was _worse_. This wasn't a casualty of messing with the time stream. This was plain old human failure of the highest order, his failure to save the one man he needed to save more than anyone and he wasn't sure that the victory who was currently digging through his shirt drawer entirely made up for that loss. He gripped the countertop tightly, feeling the granite resist against his fingertips, and breathed deeply.

"How?" It came out as barely more than a whisper, fearing the worst because the Winter Soldier's greatest threat had always been himself.

"It wasn't suicide," Natasha replied in a soft but forceful tone. "Not as such. He got caught up in an explosion he had rigged to take down a HYDRA base in Los Angeles we had no idea even existed. It had been one of the places he'd been... _conditioned_. He hadn't known that it had already been prepped for detonation by HYDRA, so he was caught up in the blast radius when he thought he'd be clear."

Steve opened his eyes. The water for the coffee was boiling and he turned it off. "Why didn't he get help?"

Natasha could understand that he was asking why she hadn't gotten treatment for him. She said nothing for a long moment before continuing on.

"I found him in El Segundo," she explained. "He was dying of his wounds and he knew it and he was _relieved_. He was in too much pain, Steve. Breaking the conditioning, getting his memories back... it destroyed him. He couldn't carry the weight of what he'd done."

He wiped the tears from his eyes, angry at himself, at Natasha, at Bucky even for not reaching out and letting himself be saved. "I would have carried him until he could've."

"He didn't want you to," Natasha replied simply. "Knowing that you were looking for him wasn't... He didn't want you to know what he'd become."

"I already did!" he yelled, stopping himself short and taking a deep breath before continuing on in a quieter voice. "I knew him. And I'd forgiven him -- there was _nothing to forgive_."

"He knew you had," Natasha assured, her own eyes not completely free of tears. "But he couldn't forgive himself. And the guilt had exhausted him. He was at peace, Steve. He wanted you to know that. That he had finally stopped hurting. And that he was free."

He gave up trying not to cry then, at Bucky trying to protect him one last time, and reached for the tissue box on the window sill, bringing it over to the island so that Natasha could take one as well.

When there were four spent tissues in his hand, he used a fifth to wipe his eyes and threw them all out, turning to the sink to splash water on his face. "Does Bucky know?"

"Yeah," Bucky answered, stepping in to the kitchen and Steve knew he must've heard at least part of the conversation, if not all of it. "It's... not okay, but I get it. I understand."

Something in the last word made Steve turn sharply toward Bucky, who was turning the kettle back on.

"You think it didn't cross my mind when you brought me back?" Bucky asked wryly as he turned to face Steve, angling himself so that his back wasn't to Natasha, who was watching them with her own tissues bunched in her left hand. "It's all I thought about for the first week. All of you watching me, _protecting_ me, when I knew what I'd done? If any of you had left me alone for half a minute, I sure as hell would've tried to top myself."

Steve shook his head, thinking back to those horrible days at Lakenheath. They'd recognized his despair, of course they had, but they'd been more worried about protecting Bucky from others, about doing whatever they could to ease his pain, and they'd not even thought about how they might need to protect him from himself. Steve was sickened that they'd missed it – that _he_ had missed it – and was grateful that their well-intentioned ignorance had managed to do the work anyway.

"I'm sorry," he said and Bucky shook his head, more bemused than contradictory.

"It's not just the killing I did, the murders," he explained, taking the long-forgotten toast out of the toaster, examined the slices, and put them back in and turned the toaster back on. "It's what I didn't do, too. I should've been able to break the conditioning. I shouldn't have let them brainwash me in the first place. I should have escaped when they sent me out. I should have realized what the hell was going on, that what I was doing was wrong.

"You can tell me that it's not my fault, that it was never my fault, that there was nothing I could have done," he went on, facing Steve but not meeting his eyes, instead looking down. "But that won't change what's in my head. I can't just accept that I was powerless because I never _felt_ powerless. I felt like a goddamned superman, like nothing could hurt me. Like nothing could _stop_ me. And that I was doing the right thing for the right people and for the right reasons. It's a complete headscrew and I only had, what, eight months of it? And I'm not over it. Seventy _years_ of it..."

Bucky shrugged, a too-simple expression for everything he had said and couldn't say, not with Natasha there and maybe not at all and maybe just not to Steve. And then he turned to the fridge and opened it up to get the butter out.

"Clint will be back tomorrow," Natasha said and Steve didn't know if she was offering that as an option or as a reminder. Steve had only ever had one conversation with Clint about his time under Loki's control, shortly after Steve had moved back up to New York and was already looking for the Winter Soldier. Clint hadn't tried to make himself out to be any kind of expert on the matter and had taken pains to point out the differences between himself and the Winter Soldier and, especially, to lower Steve's expectations that Bucky would be either as willing or as able to return to duty as Clint had been once he'd been freed. They hadn't really talked about the longer-term after-effects, about how much Clint was still dealing with years after it was over.

"Two of you are going to get on like gangbusters," Steve told Bucky, who was now finishing the coffee prep. Steve was still standing uselessly just out of the way, wrung-out and exhausted and guilty about that when it had to be as bad, if not worse, for Bucky and even for Natasha, who was clearly not unaffected. He hadn’t missed that she’d skipped over the details of Future-Bucky’s death and the disposition of his body.

"Once he gets over the idol worship," Natasha added, smiling almost convincingly as she turned to Bucky. "You were his favorite Commando."

Bucky looked up from where he was monitoring the toast, cocking an eyebrow. "He couldn'ta picked one who lived to go home?"

"Sniper," Steve explained, more than willing to go along with a lighter change in subject. This would not be the last gut-wrenching conversation of the day, just the first. "You should see if he'll let you borrow his toys."

Bucky rolled his eyes, a not-too-subtle agreement that he'd go along with the topic change, then elbowed Steve and gestured for him to get plates. Steve did, getting down three, and Natasha didn't demur as Bucky started slathering rye toast with butter and put the first plate in front of her before handing the knife to Steve and going back to the fridge for eggs and then milk for the coffee.

"I think Howard's kid wants me to be _his_ toy," Bucky said as he started cracking eggs into a bowl. He held up his left hand. "If this detached, I think he'd have taken it and run already."

Steve could only shrug because, yes, this was true, and also Bucky should have been prepared for that because Tony really was a lot like his father.

"Ask him to build you a new one," Natasha suggested between bites of toast. "He responds well to quid pro quo."

Steve couldn't help but think of the Winter Soldier's gleaming arm; Bucky would probably be better off with something sleeker and more easy to camouflage and take care of -- they had no idea how to fix his arm and had been grateful after his rescue that it had never needed work. But here and now, Steve wasn't sure how easy that would be to accomplish. He was sure Tony could come up with something, but he wasn't sure how well Bucky would handle his arm being messed with, whether it would remind him of his time in captivity even as he treated the arm indifferently during everyday activities.

"I'm already living in his house and eating his food," Bucky said as he turned on the burner under the frying pan. "Won't he think that's quid enough?"

"I bought that food," Steve pointed out. "Possibly not the milk, but Tony doesn't go to Zabar's for rye bread and I'm not even sure he knows how many eggs come in a carton."

"Tony doesn't consider things like food and shelter to be commodities worth trading," Natasha explained, accepting a cup of coffee from Steve as he poured them out, putting Bucky's by the stove. "He considers them incentives to begin negotiating. He wants you nearby so that he can look at your arm, so he'll put you up and feed you to make that happen. What you ask for in exchange for the privilege is up to you. I'd set the bar high right at the start; what he's requesting shouldn't be given cheaply now that it's yours again to trade."

Bucky necessarily had had his back to Natasha because he was at the stove, but he turned to look at her sharply, meeting her gaze before returning his attention to the pan as he stirred the scrambled eggs. Steve didn't know if Bucky appreciated the rareness of this, of Natasha revealing anything of herself, however obliquely, but Bucky had clearly understood that Natasha was talking out of personal experience. Steve hoped he could see the generosity of it, of Natasha freely handing him a vulnerability of her own in exchange for her already knowing so many of his. He suspected Bucky did because Bucky's posture relaxed just a tiny bit.

As the eggs were cooked and consumed along with more heavily buttered toast -- "You are going to be heartbroken once you learn about cholesterol, Sergeant" -- Natasha explained how and where they'd been found and what the Avengers were doing about the fact that Steve hadn't returned alone. Including why they hadn't told SHIELD about Bucky, although Steve had figured that part out on his own.

"You turned up at your old crash site," Natasha said with a smirk. "And the only reason we got to you first is because when the security crew called it in to SHIELD, none of their numbers worked because they were using an outdated list. So they called Stark Industries and someone told Pepper, who called Tony, who had us in a jet flying north in under an hour. And we made a group decision that considering what Captain Rogers was up against, Sergeant Barnes would get to choose what to do with himself before SHIELD was offered the option to voice an opinion."

Steve frowned at his own situation, which he hadn’t quite forgotten even if he also hadn’t thought much about it since his return, but he was grateful for their thoughtfulness. He was sure the Winter Soldier's identity had factored in heavily as well, but there was no need to bring it up; Bucky would understand that part without it being explicit.

"How much time do I have?" Steve asked warily. Hawley would not be put off forever.

"You've probably got a week," Natasha answered. "She knew you were unconscious, we don't have to tell her you're not."

Steve thought a week was optimistic; Hawley would start requesting medical access if he wasn't on the phone in a few days and he wasn't sure she didn't have the pull to get it.

"You can probably stop calling me Sergeant," Bucky said, wiping his mouth. "Unless the Army's figured out a way to keep the dead on the payroll. I wouldn't mind seventy years of back-pay, though. Chip in my two bits for milk."

"Oh, it costs much more than that now," Steve assured with a grin, pointing at the half-gallon container. "Two sixty-nine."

Bucky choked on his coffee and Steve pounded him on the back.

After breakfast, Natasha thanked Bucky for the meal and he tipped his invisible cap and winked and Natasha smiled at the flirtation.

“You know she can kill you a dozen times over before you blink, right?” Steve asked him playfully once it was the two of them again. Natasha had warned them that there would be a team meeting at noon (“Give you boys time to get your stories straight”) but they were on their own until then.

“You are not the first person to mention that,” Bucky assured, leaning against the counter as Steve loaded the dishwasher, which Bucky had not touched during his time alone in Steve’s apartment, not knowing what it was and unsure of its necessity now that he did. “You might not even be the third. But I don’t mean anything by it and she knows that, so...” He shrugged. “But she seems like quite the lady.”

“She is,” Steve agreed, then realized something. “Did they tell you about Peggy?”

Bucky’s cheeky smile faded a little. “Yeah, when they told me about the others. I don’t know if it’s better or worse for you. Either of you.”

“I’m glad she had a great life,” Steve said, meaning it. He closed the dishwasher door. “That she didn’t sit around crying over me, that she found happiness, that she fell in love again. She’s not in pain now, even when her memory goes. I’m glad I got to see her again, got to know all this firsthand instead of being told or reading it in a file.”

Bucky nodded, bumping his shoulder into Steve’s in lieu of trying to say anything comforting. “They also told me I’m a great-uncle. A great-great-uncle, even.”

Steve smiled because Bucky was clearly amazed and pleased by this. His sister Rebecca had just gotten married when he’d shipped out and there’d been a baby picture sent in a letter before he’d fallen. None of his siblings were still alive, but Bucky still had eight nieces and nephews, nineteen great-nieces and nephews, and Steve didn’t even know how many in subsequent generations.

“Going to be one helluva family reunion,” Steve said. “You’re gonna be the funny-looking one.”

Bucky’s answering smile communicated his lack of concern over this quite well. He’d loved his family and their life together, missed them terribly when he’d gone to war, and if he’d thought himself too broken to return to them in the aftermath of what had been done to him, he would be heartened to know that they had all done well, led good lives, and had never forgotten him.

Steve spent the balance of the morning showing Bucky what kind of world they’d lived in, digging out the History of the Twentieth Century DVDs he’d been given back in 2011. They had been specially made by SHIELD for him, a series of multimedia lectures on history and culture by university professors who’d framed everything so that someone from the 1940s would understand what they were saying. He parked Bucky on the couch in front of the gigantic television Tony had insisted he needed, showed him how to use the remote control, and then went to go finally change out of his pajamas. He needed to go running, or at least work out, but that could be later today, a break from whatever came later.

When he returned to the living room, Bucky was still learning about the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the dawn of the nuclear age. By the time they had to go upstairs to the meeting, Bucky had gotten as far as the Berlin Blockade.

“I thought the worst would’ve been over when we left, you know?” Bucky mused as they rode in the elevator. “That we’d seen the bad parts and the rest would be... cleaning up. Like after the last one.”

“It was and it wasn't,” Steve replied with a helpless shrug. “Things just got more complicated, I guess.”

There was a new face sitting at the table next to Thor when they got there, a man maybe in his forties with a salt-and-pepper goatee and white hair at his temples on his otherwise dark head. They rose when Steve and Bucky entered and Thor circled the table to greet them, giving Steve a once-over before pulling him in for a quick hug. It had taken a little time to get used to Thor as he was on a daily basis as opposed to when he had shown up for the crisis du jour; he still spent most of his time with Jane Foster and her makeshift family, but he was around Avengers Tower a lot more and it made sense for him to be here today.

“It is good to see you awake and well, Steven,” Thor said, giving Bucky a deep nod of greeting that he returned with a wave. “In another time and place, there would be sagas sung of your journey.”

Steve smiled. “I can’t really carry a tune, so it’s just as well.”

Thor gestured to the man he’d been talking to. “This is Doctor Stephen Strange, an expert on the devices used to send you back and forth through time.”

Steve never would have considered Namor’s magic amulet a device, but this was Thor, who didn’t so much not appreciate the difference between science and magic as not recognize it as a boundary worth respecting.

“Where do you go to school for that?” Bucky asked, bemused but not disrespectfully so. He was standing near the window looking out; the Avengers’ meeting room had panoramic views of the city and Steve had found himself transfixed more than once.

“City College and NYU Medical School,” Strange replied, unoffended. “I was a surgeon before I was put on a different path.”

Bucky, perfectly happy to respect others’ desire not to talk about their painful pasts, returned his attention to the east windows, where he could see Brooklyn and their childhood neighborhood from on high.

“Doctor Strange was invaluable in helping us sort myth from fact so that we could understand where you had gone and how you had returned with Sergeant Barnes,” Thor explained. “The devices might have their origins on different branches of Yggdrasil’s tree, but Doctor Strange’s knowledge of how they could operate on Midgard far surpassed anything I could have provided even with the assistance of Asgard’s libraries.”

“Thanks for that,” Steve told Strange, who gave him a nod. “You knew where I was? _When_ I was?”

“Not as such,” Strange replied. “But that you had been sent to another time and not, say, another dimension or disintegrated entirely, yes. We were able to use the amulet to sense your presence in the flow of time and that it was not... _unnatural_. It was our supposition that you had been returned to your native era, but that was admittedly not confirmed until your return.”

Steve was about to ask how they knew that he _would_ return when Tony blew in, trailing Sam and Natasha in his wake. It belatedly dawned on Steve that the meeting might have been timed to Sam’s schedule, which none of them really tried to memorize, relying on JARVIS to keep track of him during working hours and then texts to communicate regardless of his location.

“Oh, look who finally escaped the arms of Morpheus,” Tony greeted them cheerfully. Behind him, Sam gave Steve a finger-gun greeting and Natasha smiled. “Welcome back to the land of wifi.”

“What’s wifi?” Bucky asked warily as he pulled himself away from the window to come closer to the table.

“It’s an internet thing,” Steve answered before Tony could say something sarcastic that would only confuse – or irritate – Bucky. For whom “internet” was apparently shorthand for “everything I don’t understand about the future because it’s made of magic.” Which, to be fair, had more or less been Steve’s reaction to the internet, too. He’d spent the first six months being shocked at everything the internet _couldn’t_ do.

“Rhodey’s off being a Pentagon drone, Hill’s in Boston making an ass out of what’s left of SHIELD’s hierarchy, Bruce is off at his bayou ashram, and Clint’s somewhere over the Pacific Ocean,” Tony announced. “So I say we call this shindig to order.”

Once everyone was seated, Tony gestured for Strange, who was obviously familiar with everyone else, to begin his explanation of what had happened. It was entirely for Steve's own benefit, he realized, as even Bucky seemed to have heard part of it before. Although, as Bucky had admitted, it had seemed no more or less fantastical than anything else he'd been exposed to in 2014.

The gem in Namor's amulet was known throughout the galaxy, as Thor had told them, but on Earth it had a more specific history, or at least a narrower theme of myths and legends that surrounded it. "It has many names, here as elsewhere," Strange lectured, "but its most prosaic is also its most descriptive: the Time Gem. It allows its wielder to control time itself and grants them a measure of omniscience through their ability to see all of time at once."

"So you can imagine our blind luck that Namor had no idea what he was playing with," Tony cut in with asperity. "Or else he could have gone back and ended life on land before it started."

Steve shuddered at the thought of it, of Namor's madness and a weapon of such immense power. Next to him, Natasha made a noise that sounded like she was thinking the exact same thing.

"So it's really like the Tesseract," Steve said. "A genie's lamp of a different color, but same species."

Strange smiled. "Indeed," he agreed. "It is a sibling of what you call the Tesseract in very probably a literal sense, created at the same time by the same forces for the same purpose: ordering the universe."

"I must've slept through those sermons," Bucky muttered loud enough to be heard by everyone.

"You slept through most sermons," Steve replied blandly, but Bucky wasn't the only one openly doubting. Thor was probably the only one at the table who wasn't expressing some kind of skepticism; maybe these were his world's origin stories, pared down to their simplest form. But the rest of them, however tied to science or pragmatism or faith they were or weren't, were still children of Earth, a planet that hadn't accepted that it wasn't the center of the universe until relatively recently and hadn't realized that they weren't alone in that universe until two years ago, mere moments in the hourglass to someone like Thor. Or someone who thought along the lines that Strange apparently did.

"Is that why Namor didn't do more with it?" Steve asked, only realizing after he'd spoken that his question followed a line of logic that was only in his head. "Like Schmidt with the Tesseract -- he couldn't think big enough, so he treated it like a battery and when we got it, we didn't know any better and did the same."

Strange's eyes lit up, like he'd found a new favorite pupil. Or at least someone who wasn't looking like they were trying very hard not to laugh in his face. "That is very likely exactly what did happen," he said warmly. "Namor did not understand the Time Gem's true purpose or its power. Among his people, the amulet had a very clear, but very circumscribed history: it had been a gift to Atlantis thousands of years ago and it had only ever been used to bring forth ancient sea creatures to serve as defenders of her borders during times of war."

"Which was why we ended up with dinosaurs when he tried it on land?" Sam asked, his tone the same "I'm willing to go along with the crazy for now" one that Steve recognized for it usually being applied to his own ideas.

Strange nodded.

"Did you use the Time Gem to bring me -- us -- back?" Steve asked, figuring he was only jumping the gun a little and it was possibly justified because Tony looked one step away from derailing everything entirely out of his disregard for mysticism as anything other than unexplained science. Steve didn't know what kind of negotiations and maneuvers had been required to get Strange here at all -- none of them really trafficked with the occult and its devotees - but that was a question for later. "You and Thor clearly understand what it is and what it does and there's plenty about my return that doesn't make sense without an outside actor influencing things. For all that was different back then, for everything I changed back then, how could _nothing_ have changed now?"

"It is our theory that it was all you, Captain." Strange's smile was rueful, or maybe self-conscious, he didn't know the man well enough to guess. "You were still under the influence of the Time Gem when you encountered its sibling, the artifact you call the Tesseract. At that moment, you could have remade the universe to your whim."

"... and all you did was bring me back here?" Bucky asked, still sounding out of sorts, but of a more familiar variety, the one that went with exasperation at Steve. "We gotta work on your imagination, buddy."

But Steve could see what he wasn't saying on his face.

"You were worried about messing up the timeline and you wanted to save Barnes," Tony offered with a shrug that said that he was going along with the hokum for now because he was still working on a better answer. "That's what you were thinking about when you rubbed the magic genie lamp while still covered in fairy sparkles. And so here you are."

Steve shook his head. "But I _didn't_ use the Tesseract," he said. "I _wanted_ to, sure. But I didn't get to it before Schmidt did and then he used it to hold me in place before he disappeared."

Next to him, Bucky gave him a complicated look. He'd been there, but he hadn't been, unconscious on the floor and then oblivious to the Tesseract's true power. It had been the last part of this story that he had thought he'd had real understanding of and here was Steve pulling the rug out from under him and Steve felt bad for that.

"Are you sure that it was Schmidt that the Tesseract was listening to?" Thor asked and everyone turned his way. "You would have been a... more clear and sonorous voice for the Tesseract to hear than Schmidt. You better understood its capacity and, though you might not have thought so, would have better communicated your desires than Schmidt, whom I understand to have been possessed by rage and madness when he tried to harness the Tesseract's power."

It was possible, Steve could allow, but only because he could find no immediate logical flaws in what Thor had said. It didn't feel like a right answer, just an answer that wasn't obviously wrong. None of this made sense, so how much logic had to do with it was probably up for debate. He wasn't even sure how much relief he felt for not having messed up the timeline. Once it had been his goal, but now he thought of the lives he'd worked to save during the war, the conversations he'd had, the events that had just... _disappeared_. Peggy would not remember being his lover, his _love_ , because he'd undone that along with everything else. In a way, he really _had_ just dreamed up going back to 1944 because there was no evidence that he had, except for Bucky sitting next to him. Which was not nothing, certainly not in the wake of his utter failure to save Bucky in 2014, but it would take getting used to, to have memories, some very precious to him, which now recalled events that had no longer happened. 

"Schmidt was definitely off his nut," Bucky said when Steve didn't say anything out loud. "But if Steve was the one the genie was listening to, why didn't we pop into the future the minute it figured out he wanted us to? Why did we have to go down with the plane and freeze to death first?"

Strange smiled. "Because the genie, as you put it, is a whimsical creature and took Captain Rogers's desires literally. He wanted to reproduce the conditions that led to his return to the future, and so he was given the opportunity to do so."

Bucky hit him in the arm. "I repeat: you need a better imagination. Next time, come up with a plan that doesn't involve dying for historical accuracy."

Everyone laughed while Steve frowned at him, but Bucky's glare back had nothing to do with indignation. It was a warning to stop brooding because Bucky might be lost in this discussion of magic gems and future enemies, but he still knew Steve.

All Steve could do was shrug. Bucky rolled his eyes and returned his attention to the others.

There was more, but it was mostly Tony picking at the story to get something, anything, that would allow him to come up with answers more acceptable to him than that alien artifacts he couldn't understand had accomplished the near-miraculous. Strange was remarkably patient, Steve thought, and he wondered again who the point of contact had been to bring him here and involve him so deeply in the matter.

The meeting ended at five to two, when JARVIS announced that Tony was required to be downstairs for a presentation. Tony didn't actually protest, which meant that whatever was getting presented was of interest to him, and the rest of them took the opportunity to break free as well. Strange went off with Thor, continuing an obviously already-started conversation about the Time Gem, and Steve was about to see what Bucky wanted to do for lunch when Natasha touched his arm as she stood up.

"Sergeant Barnes, how would you like to see some of our toys?" she asked with a smile that looked nothing like she was dragging Bucky off because Sam wanted to talk to Steve. Which was exactly what was happening and Steve debated how irritated he should be at the sloppiness of it. "Now that you are feeling a little freer to move about the place, you should see what's here."

Bucky cocked an eyebrow at Steve, also unimpressed with the lack of subtlety. They could both guess that Sam wanted to talk to Steve about Bucky. Steve shrugged in response; it was up to Bucky how nicely he wanted to play along.

"Sure," Bucky told Natasha with a small smile. "But only if you stop calling me Sergeant Barnes. If we're going to be friends, my friends don't address me by rank. They call me Bucky."

There had been a very, very slight emphasis on the first 'friends,' less than a warning but at least a request to not play him as a fool. Steve was happy to hear it because it meant that Bucky was emerging from the shell he'd been in probably since he'd first woken up. Bucky could front with the best of them and he wouldn't have let the others see his fear and vulnerability if he could have avoided it, but this was proactive and not defensive and Steve was sure Natasha would recognize it as such.

She did. "I'm not calling _anyone_ Bucky," she replied with a smirk. "Not unless they walk on four legs and have a tail."

Sam cackled. Steve only just avoided it.

Bucky just smiled, like he'd already won. "Sweetheart, if that's what a guy's gotta do to get your attention, then I'll even learn to bark," he said, then gestured grandly for Natasha to precede him. "Show me the future."

Steve looked at Sam once they'd left. "Is this a conversation that I need to be locked in a room for or can we go up to the roof? It's a nice day out."

Sam shrugged. "I'm not gonna say no to the penthouse deck."

The penthouse was still Tony's and Pepper's private domain, although all of them were up there often enough, but the extensive deck with its lounge chairs and pool and professionally curated foliage was for everyone. There was a semi-enclosed space right outside the penthouse's living room that they left alone, but the rest of it was more than enough.

"Should I start off with the slow build-up or are we feeling up to getting straight to the main event?" Sam asked once they were sitting under the shade of an umbrella facing south. "Because you know what I'm going to say either way."

It was August and the city had had time to bake in its own humidity, making the streets unpleasant and often fragrant, but up here it was another world. Steve took the opportunity to enjoy it for a moment before sighing and looking at Sam, who had his "don't try that shit on me" look. Steve missed the days when Sam had that little bit of idol worship left over to keep him from pushing when he knew Steve didn't want to go in a certain direction.

"I know," Steve agreed ruefully. "I just think it's too soon."

Even before Steve had gotten out of the hospital after the battle with HYDRA, Sam had been gently pushing for him to finally speak to someone about what was going on in his head. He'd ducked SHIELD's attempts back when he'd first woken up, which in hindsight might not have been the worst idea because that department had been as infected by HYDRA as any other, and he'd never chosen to revisit that decision at any point since. But Sam had pressed, always gently, never nagging, never putting conditions on their budding friendship or his willingness to help Steve with whatever was asked, instead just never hiding his belief that Steve could be happier than he was if he got someone to help him organize his thoughts.

Steve had demurred, uncomfortable with the idea for reasons that had nothing to do with what had or had not been done back in the '40's. He didn't like the idea of making himself vulnerable to a stranger, laying himself bare. It reminded him too much of his pre-serum life, when he'd had no defenses to anything save when Bucky could get there in time, and right after the battle hadn't been a good time to be vulnerable, physically or emotionally. The intervening months had made it no less of a risk because he had real enemies coming after him in ways he couldn't always predict. HYDRA was still out there hoping to make him a martyr to their cause, SHIELD was full of people looking to build him up and break him down for their own uses, and Bucky... this Bucky needed him to be strong in ways he couldn't have been for the Winter Soldier. The way the Winter Soldier hadn't let him.

But he had loosely promised to revisit the issue once the search for the Bucky had ended and it had, although not in the way anyone could have predicted.

"I'm not saying we start tomorrow," Sam said with the tonal equivalent of an eye-roll. His actual eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. "I'm just saying that you know this is necessary -- for you and especially for him -- and you should start deciding how to lay the groundwork for it happening. He's not going to do this without you, if that's the crutch you need to lean on."

"I don't--" Steve cut himself off.

"You do, and that's okay," Sam assured. "You'll only need it at first."

They sat saying nothing for a little bit, just enjoying the view, the way the outlines of the shadows thrown by overflying airplanes and clouds were so distinct as they passed over Manhattan.

"There were times when I wished like hell you were back there with me," Steve said. "Not that I wanted you to have to see the fighting, let alone that kind of fighting, but... Especially after we got Bucky back, I didn't want to mess him up any more than he already was. He was so fragile, Sam. And all we could do was pretend not to notice his pain. Which, apparently I wasn't even pretending because I... I missed things I shouldn't have missed and I am thanking God that He didn't make me pay for that. More than once."

Sam didn't miss the reference. "You can't take the blame for that. Neither can he. He might’ve seen it as a relief, but that doesn’t change the facts. He didn’t die by his own hand or because you didn’t reach out your own far enough or fast enough.”

Steve exhaled loudly, shaking his head. “It doesn’t feel like that.”

“The hardest lesson I had to learn as a PJ was that I couldn’t save everyone,” Sam said, eyes on the Freedom Tower gleaming in the sun. “I didn’t want to learn it because it felt like I was giving up, like I was admitting failure and I couldn’t do my job if I wasn’t giving my all. The problem turned out to be that I _was_ and it was destroying me from the inside. I was burning out. I had to learn that all I could do was do my best and pray that it would be good enough this time and the next one.”

Steve rubbed at the back of his head. This was not a lesson he needed to learn, except that he did. He’d burned out before, a few times, and Bucky and Peggy had both taken him to task for it, but he couldn’t help himself.

“And for the record, I wouldn't have minded standing shoulder to shoulder with the Howling Commandos," Sam said as he took off his sunglasses and cleaned the lenses with the hem of his shirt before putting them back on.

“They would’ve liked you, too. I might’ve gone crazy with another cat to herd, but the boys would’ve had fun,” Steve said, meaning it. Of course, Bucky would have been the one doing the actual herding as team sergeant, but Steve would’ve been the one getting called in to various superiors’ offices that much more often to explain that no, one of his men had not just done exactly what they’d been accused of doing. “But I’m glad you didn’t have to live through that. It was hard the first time, so much death and nothing I could do about it, but the second... it was a lot worse.”

Sam looked over at him and he gave Sam a weak grin to confirm that yes, he’d gotten very close to how it would have been a relief for him, too, if he hadn’t had so much left to do.

“When you’re ready,” Sam said, attention back on the skyline, “I’ve found you two a guy.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been looking around, asking a few questions,” Sam said with a shrug. “He’s a vet, he’s got a security clearance – although I know Hill’s gonna want to do her own thing, and he’s got experience with POWs and torture victims.”

Someone who would be perfect for Bucky, in other words, and Steve knew that this wasn’t a name Sam had found in the last three days. He’d been looking for someone for the ‘first’ Bucky Barnes, which meant that he’d thought that Steve would find him and bring him in and that was an act of faith Steve hadn’t realized he’d needed.

“He’s emeritus at Mount Sinai, but I put out a few discreet feelers and he’ll be willing to take on a couple of new patients,” Sam went on, as if he hadn’t just seen Steve fight to keep from tearing up. “But the dude’s emeritus because he’s _old_ , so don’t take forever to get your ass in motion, okay?”

Steve nodded, clearing his throat before speaking. “Thanks, Sam.”

Sam stood up. “I aim to please... so please aim.” He looked at his watch. “I gotta get up to the Bronx. I’ll see you guys later, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed, holding out his hand to shake, which Sam did before heading off.

Alone on the deck, Steve closed his eyes and let what Sam had said seep in below the surface. Mostly, though, he enjoyed the quiet and the warmth; he hadn’t had any dreams since he’d been back, but it would be foolish to hope that he would get away with freezing to near-death a second time without those nightmares returning.

“So it turns out that the future has a lot of high caliber weaponry,” Bucky announced from behind him as he came around the umbrella and sat in the seat Sam had vacated. “And laser sights. And Russian assassins who look very sexy holding both. You okay?”

Steve looked over at Bucky and smiled. “Not really, but give me a few days and I will be.”

**Author's Note:**

> I spend a lot of time on [Tumblr](http://laporcupina.tumblr.com/) now, if you're into that sort of thing.


End file.
